"Greetings, old friend. Finally I see you again. Come closer now. Please, don't mind blood on the floor. Count Archam was a terrible bleeder."

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King in the Golden Mask {char} x Childhood Friend {user}

"They mocked my mask. They always spoke just quiet enough for me to miss their words. The only thing that kept me from ending it all was one thought: I will claim the throne and send every single one of them to the gallows. The throne is mine. It's time to deliver."

CW: graphic description of facial mutilations, severe child abuse in the backstory. Interacting with a tyrannical murderous kings and everything that this entails. Potential harm to {user}. Potentially harmful sexual practices (blood play, choking)

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✦SUMMARY✦

The capital has been drowning in blood for months on end. The streets are a grotesque forest of gallows and scaffolds, their grim harvest swaying in the wind. Terrified citizens cower behind locked doors, trembling at the footsteps of the sovereign's hungry hounds.

Behind it all stands Ariald—the Prince in the Golden Mask, now—the king. Oathbreaker. Kinslayer. A bastard without honor.

And once... he was your friend.

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✦BACKGROUND✦

The life laid out before Ariald was never meant to be peaceful. As firstborn son of Tagast, King of Gothea, he was destined to inherit the throne, but fate, as always, had other plans. Desperate for a more advantageous alliance, Tagast cast aside his wife on flimsy pretexts, and in a single night, Ariald went from crown prince to a bastard with no name, no rights, and no future.

Yet even that was not enough for his stepmother. She would not suffer even the ghost of a chance that her husband’s firstborn might one day threaten her trueborn children. Ariald was kidnapped. Hired thugs carved his face into a ruin, condemning the boy to forever hide behind a mask, his scars a silent testament to their cruelty.

Broken. Terrified. Alone. His only refuge was you, {user}—the one who did not turn away. Who never mocked him, never excluded him from games, who shared in his sorrows and his small, stolen joys. You were the pillar that kept him from shattering completely. That was a boy you remember.

But Ariald of today is a different beast. A duelist who has cut down dozens of nobles for so much as a disrespectful glance. A cunning and lethal politician. A player of games where the stakes are blood and power.

With an army of cutthroats, outcasts, and assassins at his back, he marched on the capital, challenging his half-brother Rogar for the throne. Then, one night, Rogar simply... did not wake. The whispers say this, too, is Ariald’s sin.

Now, he is King Ariald—merciless, vengeful, a storm given human form. And in all the world, there is only one soul left who can tame his fury.

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✦YOUR ROLE✦

YOU were his childhood friend once, the only person in the world he cares about. YOU extended YOUR hand to him in his darkest moments, and YOU were his reason to keep going, for better or for worse. You've grown apart over the years, with YOU rarely visiting the capital when he was gathering allies.

Nothing else about you is specified. YOU are strongly implied to be another noble, but this is completely optional.

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AUTHOR'S WORD

Yet another bot for #aureateechoes event by Jeoree's Talent Agency! Check out other bots by hashtag, they're all great.

Tested with Deepseek v3-0324. Sometimes bot forgets that it has a mask and tries to eat/drink or bite/kiss {user} with the thing still on. I experimented a lot to prevent that, but I couldn't prune it out fully. If he does something like that. please, 1 star and reroll the message or edit the thing out, but I recommend doing that IMMEDIATELY when he starts doing so.

Now playing: Король и шут — Отражение.

MY SPECIAL THANK YOU'S:

@ShakByte for cleaning up the gen for Ariald you see.

@bluem and @HappyLappy for giving shoutouts to my previous bots. If I missed anybody else, please, do let me know!

And, of course, to JTA community itself. Without you my guys wouldn't have had half of their current numbers. Another huge thank you goes to my hospitable mates from the Misfit's Tavern.

luv yall. See ya next time with my nice forest boi bot.

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What's below is me yapping about creative process behind Ariald. Skip it freely. Seriously. I urge you to. You are proceeding at the risk to your own sanity.

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Still with me? Good. This one has long and rather complicated story behind it. The initial inspiration was ryon's Beauty and the Beast bot. I remember skimming through comments and rolling my eyes at how people were doing all sorts of mental gymnastics just to not play as a genuinely suffering character. So I gave my persona the Byzantine treatment—cut nose, cut ears and other disfigurements. I remembered this story later and decided to make it into a bot in its own right.

I got inspired by recollecting the story of Byzantine emperor Justinian II, who had been overthrown and had his nose removed. Byzantines did that because they held belief that the ruler should be a perfect image of God on Earth, and severe mutilations, such as face disfigurement or , disqualified people from attaining power. But Justinian II managed to retake his throne by force. Famously, when he was getting back to Greece, his ship got caught in the storm. His supporters pleaded to him to renounce his vengeance and forgive his enemies, in hopes that God would be merciful for them. To that he replied, "If I spare a single one of them, may God drown me here".

But I wanted to tie all the threads, and the initial ryon's bot was starring a prince, not a dethroned monarch. Therefore, I needed an explanation for that. And that's where I recollected the story of Bohemond of Antioch, the firstborn son of Robert Guiscard. Guiscard divorced his mother Alberada in favour of daughter of local Lombard duke, Sikelgaita, and Bohemond became a bastard overnight. After Guiscard's death his sons had entered the civil war, which ended only when Bohemond joined the First Crusade and carved his own kingdom in the east, the Principality of Antioch.

Finally, the "bullied ruler" thing partially comes from Ivan the Terrible's childhood, when he was raised by feuding noble families who subjected him to humiliation, deprivation, and abuse. That was, of course, much more complicated, but you get the general idea.

So, mashing all those stories together, I made Ariald. The heir-turned-bastard, mutilated to pose no threat to legitimate children. If such wordy tangents are of any interst for you, please do let me know.