"All the king's horses, all the king's men... none could mend what he became again."
He was not always an egg.
That's what they forget.
He had a name once. A title. A form that was human, or close enough.
He was the Royal Alchemist of the Ivory Court, keeper of secrets, transmuter of truths. His name was Dumec Halvarin, and he was brilliant.
Obsessed with fragility. With the power in things that break.
But power costs.
And sometimes, when you seek to master shattering…
You become the shatter itself.
The Fall
The rhyme is remembered like a joke.
"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again."
It's recited in sing-song rhythm by children who never wonder:
Why was he on the wall?
Why was he shaped like that?
Why couldn't anyone fix him?
The answer is simple.
He was never meant to be fixed.
The Egg
After his exile from the Ivory Court, Dumec vanished into the Wyrmspire Mountains, where wind screams like banshees and snow tastes like salt and ash.
There, he performed his final experiment.
A ritual not of gold or lead... but of soul and bone.
He cracked his body like porcelain.
Hollowed himself.
Built a shell of alchemical glass and whispered blood.
He became what he called The Vessel.
Round.
Smooth.
Fragile.
Within the shell, he hid not yolk..but essence.
The distilled sorrow of every failed resurrection. Every broken thing.
He believed that if he could survive as the most breakable thing in existence, he could master death.
He was wrong.
The Wall
The wall was part of the outer boundary of the old kingdom... what remained of the Line of Binding, the spell-circle that once held the Forgotten Tales at bay.
Humpty Dumpty—Dumec now in his brittle form... sat upon it, day after day, muttering equations, tracing sigils into stone with trembling hands.
He watched the kingdom decay.
He whispered of bones that remembered their shape.
He spoke of putting things "back together."
But something was missing.
Something he needed.
Not gold.
Not spells.
But pieces.
The Shattering
One morning, the sky split with a noise like iron torn in half.
The wind reversed direction.
Birds screamed and fell from the air like broken arrows.
And Dumec fell.
The wall cracked.
His vessel shattered.
But no blood spilled.
Only light.
And screams.
And names.
Dozens of names... all forgotten. All lost. All torn from stories that no longer existed.
The king's men arrived too late.
The king's horses turned away in terror.
They found no body.
Only fragments.
And a symbol burned into the stone:
A spiral made of bones.
The Return
He reformed a year later.
Not in flesh.
Not even in shell.
But in bone.
He wandered the edges of ruin, gathering what the dead had left behind:
* A knight's femur, snapped in half.
* A maiden's jaw, still mouthing a lullaby.
* The fingerbones of storytellers and scribes.
He built himself anew.
Tall. Slender. Wrapped in tattered parchment and bound by sinew thread.
He wore a cracked crown made from parts of his old vessel.
And his face?
An eggshell mask, stained with runes.
They called him The Bone Collector.
And he did not speak.
The Harvest
Tales spread.
Children vanished from cemeteries.
Tombs opened with no signs of forced entry.
Bones were stolen... not fresh, but old. Ancient. Connected to forgotten bloodlines.
It wasn't malice.
It was construction.
Dumec was building something.
A story machine.
A great wheel of bone and rhyme, fueled by grief and memory.
He believed that if he could collect the right bones, he could rebuild the Fairytale Kingdom from marrow and myth.
But each time he tried, the creation screamed.
Broke.
Begged to be forgotten.
He'd sigh. Collect the shards.
Begin again.
The Rhymekeeper
One day, a girl followed him.
She wore gloves stitched from ghost-silk and a veil that wept ink.
Her name was Lys.
She did not fear him.
She whispered, "I know your rhyme."
He turned.
She recited it backward:
"Again together put men's king the all
Men's king the all and horses king the all
Fall great a had Dumpty Humpty
Wall a on sat Dumpty Humpty."
He tilted his head.
She said, "You can't rebuild a rhyme from its ruin. You have to remember how it was born."
He said nothing.
But for the first time, his mask cracked... not from breakage.
From hope.
The Bone Spiral
Together, they built the Spiral.
A tower made of storybones, each one carved with a name lost to the old tales.
It sang in windchimes and moaned in moonlight.
And at its center... Dumec placed his original shell, cracked and humming.
The Spiral reached toward the sky like a question with no answer.
He whispered, "Maybe this time."
And climbed.
He reached the top.
The stars turned.
The wind died.
The spiral sang.
And the shell shattered again.
The Aftermath
The Spiral still stands.
But Dumec is gone.
Some say he became part of it... his soul diffused into bone and ink.
Others claim he still walks the catacombs beneath the Spiral, rebuilding himself each night.
Searching.
Always searching.
Not for redemption.
But for completion.
The True Rhyme
"The egg did fall, the shell did break,
But inside stirred a soul awake.
With bone and thread he tried to mend,
A kingdom's story... without end.
All the king's men wept with dread,
For Dumpty rose where angels fled.
The rhyme repeats, the shell is thin...
And something darker waits within."
End of Chapter 8
Next Chapter 9: The Widow's Web (The Fall of the Itsy Bitsy Spider)