Divine Right of Kings

The following day Rickert makes the steep ascent to the citadel and shows the guards Laban's writ to gain entry. Struck by how the fortress is shaped like a hawk, almost tailored to Griffith, he encounters Owen, now in command of the citadel guard, who has learned of the visitor and his former Falcon standing from Laban and comes to welcome him personally.

Owen leads him deeper and explains that Griffith cannot receive him yet because he is conducting a mass. The confusion clears when they reach a hall of mourners standing over open caskets, where the Pontiff presides on a raised platform. The dead, Owen notes, are refugees who never completed the journey, and their families have gathered to bid farewell. Sonia, Charlotte, and Griffith share the dais, and Griffith conjures the spirits of the departed, which begin as small tailed lights before drifting to their kin and swelling into the shapes they once wore, reunited yet unable to trade words.

Locus appears behind the pair, and Rickert senses at once that he is no man. The knight reasons that the mourners are glimpsing what lies past death, since the return of the dead implies some realm that holds them. Griffith then calls on Sonia to complete the rite as a medium bridging the living and the dead so they may finally speak. Locus asks whether Rickert understands how kings gain their thrones, observing that a true sovereign receives his rule from a higher power, and that the fables of such kings pale beside the authority now bestowed on Griffith.

Rickert enters Griffith's hawk-shaped citadel and is greeted by Owen. He witnesses a mass where Griffith summons the spirits of the refugee dead for their families. Locus interprets the rite as proof of an afterlife. Sonia acts as a medium so the living and dead can speak, and Locus frames Griffith's power as a divine mandate to rule.

The twenty-page "Divine Right of Kings" ran in Young Animal issue eleven on 23 May 2014 within the Fantasia Arc. It underscores the religious and supernatural foundations of Griffith's new kingdom.