Tales of the Kingsfight

My young Monstervore hasn't talked much about her fantasy world of monster-eating kids lately. That's probably been a good thing, since it's given me a chance to some serious writing on the Monstervore Dictionary and try to catch up.

Recently I decided to dive into one of the big bits of work, the Kingsfight. Long ago, when she was 4 or 5, I asked her if there were any kings and queens in Kabos. "No," she said. "They're all dead. They had a big fight using their magic powers, and they all killed each other and now people don't have any kings and queens."

So over the next few days I had a lot of fun teasing a few more details out of her. She told me about King Aximom, the strongest king, who carried around his castle on his shoulders. I heard about King Rivertree, who could make plants grow really fast and make them fight for him. She stumbled into the name "King Queen" and together we spun a great tale about a princess who could beat up anybody, including defeating her royal parents in battle to take both their names, and then tried to win the entire Kingsfight on her own. There was King Beastak, the Pretender king of the monsters and dragons; Prince Quixzo, who could write books to life; Queen Korcra, who would later become the Bone Queen and the Old Ghost of the Ghostlands; and Lady Kidd, who could cast powerful spells because she ate faeries (an idea that horrified her 7 year-old self when I recounted it.)

I asked about the fights between them and we discovered the betrayal of the singing King Princer by King Seaquaro and his invading fleet--and King Seaquaro's capture by King Rivertree. With a kid's fascination, she told me about the hungry King Feastus, and how Queen Catuni defeated him by making clouds rain poison on him until he vomited himself to death. When I asked why the Kingsfight was just among the people, and the monsters hadn't been involved, she told me about how the Boss of All the Monsters tried to eat King Beastak and in turn nearly lost the monster stronghold of Sharpslime Island before Beastak used his Pretender power to control one dragon too many and got eaten.

Then I heard about how the Faery Constables couldn't stop the battles, and how they rode their alicorns around helping the "poor non-fighter people" where they can, as well as swooping in when a ruler fell in battle to seal them away in the (clearly mummy-and-pyramid-inspired) Kingtomb.

Finally, when we talked about what might happen if one king won the whole war, I told her about a monster prophet who warned the alicorns about the dark times ahead. She answered by gathering up the alicorns into a mighty war band and sending them into battle against the remaining kings in what would, years later, be renamed The Great War on the Field of Death, the battle that decimated the alicorns but also eliminated the remaining would-be tyrants and put an end to the Kingsfight.

So I had all of this fresh in my mind when we were hanging out after school yesterday, and as a birthday present she offered to color a Monstervore picture for me. I gave her a quick refresher on the Kingsfight, and reminded her that one of the things she had enjoyed doing was coming up with a flag for each of the factions in the war.

I never got her to draw those flags for me back then, but she agreed that she would draw and color them for me now--if I would help with the hard stuff, like the flower-headed lion and a flag with her made-up proto-Jum alphabet on it.

So that's what we did.

Monstervore isn't quite the font of wild creation it was for her for so long, but as I work to capture that amazing time and the incredible world that spilled out of us, it's nice to have her come back and join me once in a while as I drag things into shape. I can only hope that someday soon I'll have a book to put into her hands, so that years later she can look at it in wonder and think, "All that came out of me?"

Because yeah, it did.