King of Hybern

King of Hybern
by morgana0anagrom
General Information
Full name	Unknown
Title(s)	King of Hybern
Species	High Fae
Home	Hybern
Status	Deceased
Physical description
Gender	Male
Eye Color	Black
Hair Color	Black
Relationships
Family	Dagdan † (nephew) Brannagh † (niece)
Series Information
Appearances	A Court of Thorns and Roses (mentioned) A Court of Mist and Fury (first appearance) A Court of Wings and Ruin A Court of Frost and Starlight (mentioned) A Court of Silver Flames (mentioned)

“	The shoulder-length black hair, the ruddy skin, the clothes that edged more toward practicality than finery. He was of surprisingly average height, but muscled like a young man. But his face—which looked perhaps like a human man in his forties … Blandly handsome. To hide the depthless, hateful black eyes that burned there.	”
–Feyre Archeron when she sees the King of Hybern for first time, A Court of Mist and Fury

The King of Hybern was the ruler of the island of Hybern.

History

Background

It is unknown when or how the king ascended to the throne of Hybern, but he was the ruler at the time of the human rebellion and fought on the side of the loyalists in the War. The king of Hybern adamantly refused to let his human slaves go, thus he put the ruthless Amarantha to the task of slaughtering them.

To win the war, he decided to ally himself with the then High Lord of the Spring Court of Prythian, Tamlin's father, who did not want to free his human slaves either. During the time that their alliance lasted, Tamlin's father visited his castle numerous times, with Tamlin accompanying him on a few of them. It was at that moment that Amarantha met the future High Lord of the Spring Court and decided that she wanted him to be her lover.

When the loyalists were defeated, Hybern along with the High Lords of Prythian were forced to sign the Treaty to free their human slaves to live in their own lands that would be separated from the Fae realms by the Wall, although Amarantha disobeyed the order, but did not give up any territory to the victors. For the next five hundred years the King nurtured his people's hatred and sense of injustice, preparing for an opportunity to wage a second war in which he would emerge the victor. He sent Amarantha to Prythian as an ambassador more the fifty years before the events of A Court of Thorns and Roses, ordering her to find allies on the island. Instead, Amarantha tricked and enslaved the High Lords of Prythian and proclaimed herself up as the High Queen. The King was displeased by this development, but allowed Amarantha to rule as an experiment to see how well he could subjugate other faerie rulers when he went to war.

A Court of Mist and Fury

After Amarantha was defeated, the Attor fled from Under the Mountain to Hybern to meet the King and bring him Jurian's fingerbone and eye, on which Amarantha had placed the soul of the latter. With the magic of the Cauldron the King intended to resurrect the human general Jurian to serve as an ambassador to the Mortal Queens and bring down the wall to once again conquer the Mortal Lands.

He gave orders for his troops to raid various temples around Prythian and steal the feet of the Cauldron, killing the priestesses so there would be no witnesses.

When Feyre Archeron is practicing in a forest near her family's estate, the Attor ambushes her and almost takes her with him to Hybern since the King had ordered him to do so but is captured by Rhysand and Azriel, temporarily thwarting the plans of the King, who had a large army waiting for the right moment to attack.

The King then begins tracking Rhysand upon detecting his power, and sends his soldiers to attack him on two occasions: the first time outside the Hewn City and the second time when he was with Feyre in a forest in the Illyrian Mountains.

When one of the mortal queens gives Rhysand and his Inner Circle half of the Book of Breathings, the other queens ally with Jurian and the King of Hybern offering them immortality for servitude, they reveal the truth about Velaris, so the King sends a legion of soldiers to attack the city, under the command of the Attor, who is killed by Feyre while trying to flee after the attack.

When Feyre, Morrigan, Cassian and Azriel infiltrated his castle to nullify the Cauldron's power with the Book of Breathings they are discovered and the King sends Jurian to distract them while he places enchantments over the castle so that they could neither use their powers nor flee. Before he is able to isolate them, Rhysand appears and is also trapped with them. Jurian then shoots Azriel with a poisoned ash wood arrow, forcing them all to follow the King into the throne room. There they meet Tamlin and Lucien Vanserra, who have allied themselves with the King in exchange for severing Feyre's bond with Rhysand, and for his part the King could enter through the Spring Court to invade Prythian and destroy the wall. Then the mortal queens appear, bringing with them Nesta and Elain Archeron, who were delivered to the King by Ianthe, the High Priestess who accompanied Tamlin in the Spring Court. They are both turned into High Fae with the power of the Cauldron to show the queens that any mortal with willpower could become Fae. Feyre manages to break down the magical barriers of the King and tells Rhysand, through their bond, to get everyone, including her sisters, out of that place and then she pretends to have woken up from an enchantment put by Rhysand so that she would be by his side and forget about Tamlin. The King breaks the bond that united Rhysand and Feyre but only the bond created at the time they made the bargain whereby Feyre had to spend one week of each month in the Night Court, not their mating bond that made them mates nor the bond that bound them as High Lord and High Lady of the Night Court.

A Court of Wings and Ruin

The King sends his niece and nephew Dagdan and Brannagh to the Spring Court in order to determine where the wall was weakest and slowly poison the residents of Tamlin's manor.

When Dagdan and Brannagh were killed by Feyre, he invaded the Spring Court as vengeance for their deaths.

Wanting to retrieve the power that Nesta took from the Cauldron, the King uses his spell book so two of his Ravens can infiltrate Velaris to kidnap her, but the move backfires as they are attacked and killed by Rhysand and Bryaxis.

He later uses the power of the Cauldron to destroy the wall and sends a legion to attack Adriata. During the battle he has a face-to-face encounter with Rhysand but when he tries to attack him he realizes that the King was not actually there, but is a magical projection.

Later, when the Cauldron kidnaps Elain, Feyre goes to rescue her but is discovered as they ran away. She shot him with an ash wood arrow and he frees his naga-hounds but they manage to escape anyway.

He does not appear in any of the following battles but during the final battle, he unveiled the cauldron's magical might, annihilating the Illyrian flying legions, Prythian soldiers and killing the Bone Carver in the process. He only leaves his camp when Nesta plans a distraction to get him away from the Cauldron. When he grasps her location he goes to find her and on the way he confronts Stryga, the Weaver, to whom he says that she is beautiful tricking her into lowering her guard, and when she tells him that he should bow to her he approaches and breaks her neck, then he feeds her to his naga-hounds.

He goes to confront Nesta and finds her with Cassian. He winnows to Nesta's father and captures him using him as a human shield, so that Nesta could not kill him immediately. He then snaps her father's neck, breaking her spirit momentarily. A lengthy battle ensued, with the king attacking Cassian breaking his wings and one leg, Nesta refuses to leave him while the King looms over them. Before he can land the final blow, however, Elain surprises him from behind and stabs him in the neck with the knife Azriel had lent her, then Nesta approaches taking the knife and beheading him.

The last time he is seen, the ravens are eating his corpse.

After his death, the remaining Hybern forces continue to fight on, driven by the bloodlust and sense of outrage instilled in them since birth, until Amren enters the Cauldron and wipes them out to the last faerie. The state of Hybern after the death of their king is unknown at this time.

Appearance

While considered handsome by human standards, the King had ruddy skin and inky black hair framing a face that was considered rather plain compared to most High Fae. He wore sturdy, practical clothing instead of finery and had a muscular build, appearing in his forties if he were human. He had black eyes that burned with depthless hatred.

Personality

The king was cunning and brutal, more than willing to sacrifice the lives of soldiers and even relatives in order to accomplish his goals. He was also willing to negotiate peacefully, as shown with the mortal queens and Tamlin. It is likely that the King always intended to betray them, however. He was also incredibly intelligent, tricking the Weaver of the Wood into letting her guard down so that he could kill her, then using the Archeron's father to ensure that Nesta did not kill him immediately.

Powers and Abilities

The king was an avid student of the magical arts, and kept many powerful spells within a spellbook that he carried at all times. It was he who learned where to find the Cauldron and how to reassemble it and use it as a weapon, and he was always eager to get his hands on a new piece of magic.

His knowledge of magic, especially curses, was extreme. When the Inner Circle invade his castle to destroy the Cauldron, he casts a curse that shuts down their magic. The effects are similar to faebane, but without the mineral. Feyre and Rhysand are unable to even communicate through their mating bond. Feyre is able to break it, but only because she is uniquely Made. In addition to knowing spells, he has strong, raw power. When Tamlin attacked the King to try to save Feyre's sisters from the Cauldron, the king released white-hot magic that shoved him to the ground, despite his power as a High Lord, and leashed him. It created a collar of light around his neck and wrists, and while his magic flared he was unable to break the bindings.

Trivia

• On several occasions it was alluded to in A Court of Wings and Ruin that the king's name was Hybern as the kingdom he ruled.