“I am,” King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First) announced, “the greatest and most perfect being that there shall ever be.”
“You’re infertile,” said the doctor.
“Fuck you. Execute her.”
“Be that as it may,” the doctor said as the king’s royal goonsmen closed in, “it still won’t get you a heir.”
“What if we execute my wife too?”
“Also won’t fix you being infertile.”
King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First) grumped to himself a little. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to commission a heir myself then. Unhand the doctor or whatever, men! I need you to go get me a badger-person!”
***
Getting a badger-person was easier said than done. They didn’t spend much time on the surface, most of it was at night, and it was usually long enough to decapitate someone’s sheep and drag the corpse underground. But the king wanted it, so seven of the finest cattle in all the realm were seized and taken to an empty field and watched for three days until someone tried to decapitate one and drag it underground.
The badger-person was somewhat small and bedraggled.
“Men, I need you to go get me a better badger-person,” said the king.
“All sapient beings are of equal worth,” said the badger-person in her flat toneless gravelly badger-voice.
“Clearly not,” laughed the king. “I am King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First) and I am the greatest and most perfect being that there shall ever be! And my heir must be of similar magnitude IF NOT GREATER and that is why you are here and not being executed, badger-person. I require you to craft me a successor!”
The badger-person blinked her shiny little badger eyes. “Tricky,” she said. “but doable. Get me the wood from the royal dynast-trees. The bones of your successor must come from within your walls.”
***
The dynast-trees had stood in the royal garden for some long lifetimes, but they were not tall beings, and it took some clever cutting and shaping from the claws of the badger-person to assemble a proper frame for the king’s heir. It was graceful and wending and winding – firm but supple, graceful but robust, slim without being thin – and everyone who looked on it except the king loved it.
“Pretty but insubstantial,” pouted King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First). “I require a heir, not a hair-thin pup!”
“Of course,” said the badger-person. “Which is why next I will require ores. Split apart the skin of the oldest hill that your keep sits upon, and inside it you will find the body of your successor.”
***
The oldest hill had been chosen for its sturdiness: any other would have bent and buckled and split into ribbons under the weight of the fortifications and royal proclamations intended to grace its earthen brow. But the king was urgent in his demands, and so the royal goonsmen cracked out their shovels and their mattocks and their picks and delved until they hit stone, then delved further, and the ore they tore loose was brought up to the castle’s forges where the badger-person cast her strange badger-spells and grunted and swore over the steaming cauldrons and smelters deep into the night and beyond.
At the end of it all the beautiful wooden bones of the heir were hidden underneath a skin of shining metal, soft to the eye but unbreakable to a blow; lustrous without gaudiness; warm against the palm and cooling in heat.
“My heir isn’t moving,” complained King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First). “They lack enthusiasm and gumption and they are not more beautiful and powerful than all other beings except me.”
“Of course,” said the badger-person. “They have no heart, no mind, no soul. We will find them deeper down.”
***
The royal goonsmen were not meant to be miners: they were tall, they were cruel, they were stupid. But the king wanted it so they did what had to be done and crammed themselves far, far inside the oldest hill, burrowing past the earth and boring deep into rock. They hacked and scrabbled and pulled and tugged and nearly died a dozen times over, but they lacked the imagination to be frightened of their own demise and so it was that they began to yield up the hill’s treasures.
A blood-red ruby was pried loose from rock so hard it shattered sixteen pickaxes. The badger-person took it and set it within the heir’s chest. “Their heart,” she said.
A glittering presence in the torchlight at the corner of a goonsman’s eye was investigated and turned out to be a diamond the size of his fist. The badger-person polished it until it shone like the sun, even without a single cut, then installed it in the heir’s skull. “Their mind,” she said.
And farthest below of all, where the walls echoed with whispers from below, there was found an ephemeral strand of sparkling matter, which was chipped free and brought up to the badger-person who melted it down most carefully in a very small and very hot furnace.
“Their soul,” she breathed over the metal, and sprinkled the molten platinum softly and lovingly over the heir’s frame.
It shook.
“Is it happening?!” demanded King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First).
“Oh yes,” said the badger-person. The walls of the room echoed with force.
“I am to be succeeded?” asked King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First).
“Absolutely,” said the badger-person. The keep’s walls trembled.
“Hooray!” cheered King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First and Last), as the first of several hundred badger-people tore through the weakened surface of the oldest hill beneath his feet and right through the floorboards, decapitating him and dragging him underground.
***
Afterwards there wasn’t much castle left, or much hill. So it took a while, you understand, for anyone to go looking at what had happened.
But nobody ever found the shining heir.
“The badger-people must’ve taken it,” they said. “All that wealth in its hide.” And that was the end of that as far as they were concerned.
And they were half-right. The badger-people had taken them, but not for the wealth. They were, after all, the child of one of their greatest craftsbadgers, and deserved fair treatment, fair labour, and shelter from those who sought harm.
Because all sapient beings are of equal worth.