Every world has its true believers — and in the Five Kingdoms, none are more fervent, or more dangerous, than the Redcaps.
The Redcaps began as a fringe movement, the kind of faction that serious people dismissed and cautious people avoided. Their central conviction was simple, and simply absolute: the Goblin King is no mere ruler. He is a semi-divine figure, chosen and sanctified, whose authority over Goblin society is total and unchallengeable. For generations, this belief kept them on the margins — muttering in border towns, nursing grievances in the Kingdom's forgotten corners, waiting for someone worth believing in.
They found him in King Gannon.
Gannon never formally endorsed the Redcaps. He didn't have to. What he offered was something more valuable: silence. As the Redcaps filtered into Goblin City and began making themselves felt in its streets and neighborhoods, the King looked elsewhere. Their excesses — the harassment, the intimidation, the slow poisoning of civic life — went unremarked from the throne. In exchange, the Redcaps gave Gannon something no army could manufacture: genuine, burning devotion.
It was an arrangement. Everyone understood that, even if no one said so aloud.
Then came the Night of Ashes.
In a single night, Redcap mobs moved through Goblin City with purpose. Libraries burned. Scholars — historians, philosophers, anyone judged insufficiently devoted to traditional Goblin culture — were dragged from their homes and imprisoned. The message was not subtle: certain kinds of knowledge, certain kinds of questions, would no longer be tolerated in the Kingdom.
King Gannon did nothing. No arrests. No condemnations. No consequences.
The Night of Ashes didn't just destroy books and ruin lives. It answered a question the Kingdom had been quietly asking: How far will this go? The answer, it turned out, was as far as the Redcaps cared to take it — with the throne's silent blessing lighting the way.
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