Magadon Games: Dagon

The Story of the Dragon who ruled The World.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, the entire continent of Etrigil, the home of the Demon King's army, was tyrannized by an elder dragon named Dagon. Legended to be the father of Black dragons (But that is unconfirmed) It is he who the dragons are named after. (According to him)

The dragon stood taller than the largest cathedral, and it was covered with thick black scales, its red eyes glowed with hate, and from its terrible jaws flowed an incessant stream of evil-smelling yellowish-green slime that left the land poisoned and dying where ever it fed. It was a beast of unquenchable hunger and chaos. It demanded from all that it encountered a blood-curdling tribute to spare their lands: to satisfy its enormous appetite, ten thousand men and women had to be delivered every evening at the onset of dark to the foot of the mountain where the dragon-tyrant lived.

Sometimes the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls upon arrival; sometimes again it would lock them up in the mountain where they would wither away for months or years before eventually being consumed. He was particularly fond of elves who tasted the best.

Inside the pit of his mountain, the dragon kept some of them as slaves forcing them to clean up after him and sing songs of his glory whenever he demanded it but the most unfortunate souls, those he would use his dark magic to melt together into the walls of a cavern, unable to die, merged with a writhing, voiceless mass of thousands that lined the cave the dragon had carved out. The tube of flesh perfectly fit his massive cock. The cum of the dragon was the only sustenance they were allowed and when the deepest parts of the living flesh sex toy ate it, the rest of them where made immortal as well.

There was no escaping this hellish fate and the creature who shared many minds hated itself because some of the victims refused to let them die while others wanted so simply end their tormented existence.

The misery inflicted by the dragon-tyrant was incalculable and left a lasting trauma on the whole of the world. In addition to the ten thousand who were gruesomely slaughtered each day, there were the mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and friends that were left behind to grieve the loss of their departed loved ones.

The known world united under one banner. The House of the Red and tried to fight the dragon, but whether they were brave or foolish was difficult to say.

Priests and magicians called down curses, banishments, lightning storms, great beasts, arcane inversions and all to no avail. Warriors, armed with roaring courage and the best weapons the smiths could produce, attacked it, but were incinerated by its fire, or melted by its unholy green drool, long before coming close enough to strike.

Alchemists concocted toxic brews and tricked the dragon into swallowing them, but the only apparent effect was to further stimulate its appetite. The dragon’s claws, jaws, and fire were so effective, its scaly armor so impregnable, and its whole nature so robust, as to make it invincible to any assault by mortal or even act of Gods.

Seeing that defeating the tyrant was impossible, mortals had no choice but to obey its commands and pay the grisly tribute. The fatalities selected were always elders. Although senior people were as vigorous and healthy as the young, and sometimes wiser, the thinking was that they had at least already enjoyed a few decades of life. The wealthy might gain a brief reprieve by bribing the press gangs that came to fetch them; but, by constitutional law, nobody, not even the king himself, could put off their turn indefinitely.

Spiritual men sought to comfort those who were afraid of being eaten by the dragon (which included almost everyone, although many denied it in public) by promising another life after death, a life that would be free from the dragon-scourge. Other orators argued that the dragon has its place in the natural order and a moral right to be fed. They said that it was part of the very meaning of being mortal to end up in the dragon’s stomach. Others still maintained that the dragon was good for the various species because it kept the population size down and that uniting to fight or serve the dragon had brought a level of peace and cooperation never seen in the history of the world. The Dragon had united them. They had peace and was not this terrible price a fair bargain for that peace?

To what extent these arguments convinced the worried souls is not known. Most people tried to cope by not thinking about the grim end that awaited them. For many centuries this desperate state of affairs continued. Nobody kept count any longer of the cumulative death toll, nor of the number of tears shed by the bereft. Expectations had gradually adjusted and the dragon-tyrant had become a fact of life. Because of the evident futility of resistance, attempts to kill the dragon had ceased. Instead, efforts now focused on placating it. While the dragon would occasionally raid the cities, it was found that the punctual delivery to the mountain of its quota of life reduced the frequency of these incursions.

Knowing that their turn to become dragon-fodder was always impending, people began having children earlier and more often. It was not uncommon for a girl to be pregnant by her sixteenth birthday. Couples often spawned a dozen children. The races mixed wildly creating a very culturally diverse and accepting population was thus kept from shrinking, or going to war with itself. The dragon was kept from going hungry and a calm acceptance settled over the world.

Over the course of centuries, the dragon, being well-fed, slowly but steadily grew bigger. It had become almost as large as the mountain on which it lived. And its appetite had increased proportionately. Ten thousand bodies were no longer enough to fill its belly. It now demanded eighty thousand, to be delivered to the foot of the mountain every evening at the onset of dark.

What occupied the king’s mind more than the deaths and the dragon itself was the logistics of collecting and transporting so many people to the mountain every day. This was not an easy task.

To facilitate the process, the king had a railway track constructed: two straight lines of glistening steel leading up to the dragon’s abode. Every twenty minutes, a train would arrive at the mountain terminal crammed with people and would return empty. On moonlit nights, the passengers traveling on this train, if there had been windows for them to stick their heads out of, would have been able to see in front of them the double silhouette of the dragon and the mountain, and two glowing red eyes, like the beams from a pair of giant lighthouses, pointing the way to annihilation.

Servants were employed by the king in large numbers to administer the tribute. There were registrars who kept track of whose turn it was to be sent. There were people-collectors who would be dispatched in special carts to fetch the designated people. Often traveling at breakneck speed, they would rush their cargo either to a railway station or directly to the mountain. There were clerks who administered the pensions paid to the decimated families who were no longer able to support themselves. There were anarchists who would recharge the trains while the passengers boarded. There were comforters who would travel with the doomed on their way to the dragon, trying to ease their anguish with spirits and drugs.

There was, moreover, a cadre of dragonologists who studied how these logistic processes could be made more efficient. Some dragonologists also conducted studies of the dragon’s physiology and behavior and collected samples – its shed scales, the lethal slime that drooled from its jaws, its lost teeth, and its excrement, which were speckled with fragments of human bone. All these items were painstakingly annotated and archived. The more the beast was understood, the more the general perception of its invincibility was confirmed. Its black scales, in particular, were harder than any material known to man, and there seemed no way to make as much as a scratch in its armor.

To finance all these activities, the king levied heavy taxes on his people. Dragon-related expenditures, already accounting for one-seventh of the economy, were growing even faster than the dragon itself. However, mortals are is a curious thing. Every once in a while, somebody gets a good idea. Others copy the idea, adding to it their own improvements. Over time, many wondrous tools and systems are developed. Some of these devices – mystical calculators, self-writing books, infinite scrolls, thermometers, microscopes, and the glass vials that the chemists use to boil and distill alchemic liquids – serve to make it easier to generate and try out new ideas, including ideas that expedite the process of idea-generation. Thus the great wheel of invention, which had turned at an almost imperceptibly slow pace in the older ages, gradually began to accelerate.

Sages predicted that a day would come when technology would enable humans to fly and do many other astonishing things. One of the sages, who was held in high esteem by the others but whose eccentric manners had made him a social outcast and recluse, went so far as to predict that technology would eventually make it possible to build a contraption that could kill the dragon-tyrant. The king’s scholars, however, dismissed these ideas. They said that humans were far too heavy to fly and in any case lacked feathers.

And as for the impossible notion that the dragon-tyrant could be killed, history books recounted hundreds of attempts to do just that, not one of which had been successful. “We all know that this man had some irresponsible ideas,” a scholar of letters later wrote in his obituary of the reclusive sage who had by then been sent off to be devoured by the beast whose demise he had foretold, “but his writings were quite entertaining and perhaps we should be grateful to the dragon for making possible the interesting genre of dragon-bashing literature which reveals so much about the culture of angst!”

Meanwhile, the wheel of invention kept turning. Mere decades later, humans did fly and accomplished many other astonishing things.

A few iconoclastic dragonologists began arguing for a new attack on the dragon-tyrant. Killing the dragon would not be easy, they said, but if some material could be invented that was harder than the dragon’s armor, and if this material could be fashioned into some kind of projectile, then maybe the feat would be possible.

At first, the iconoclasts’ ideas were rejected by their dragonologist peers on grounds that no known material was harder than dragon scales. After working on the problem for many years, one of the iconoclasts succeeded in demonstrating that a dragon scale could be pierced by an object made of a certain composite arcane material. Many dragonologists who had previously been skeptical now joined the iconoclasts. Engineers calculated that a huge number of large projectiles like ballisti could be made of this material and launched with sufficient force to penetrate the dragon’s armor.

They presented a plan to the King in front of all the nobility and the heroes of the land and the King was thrilled, but one of these young men said that it would not be enough. The leader of a group of adventurers who had aided the king many times in fighting the crimes that plagued all societies and stopped many evil men who would have tried to overthrow the monarchy stood before the king. The group of royal enforcers, known as The Demon's Hand for their ferocity and lethality in battle, stepped forward and explained, "In our adventures across the land we have discovered much about the lore of the Dragon. We know the truth of the beast and even if you wound it a thousand times, it will not die." The wizard of the group approached and showed artifacts recovered from a faraway land called Zebraca.

The party explained that according to the people who lived there, a tribe of outcast who had betrayed their own people and tried to over-throw the Caesar (The leader of that empire) had grown so desperate for power and revenge they had done the unthinkable, they had use a ritual of five hundred of priests to pull a star from the sky and a ritual of ten thousand wizards to bind the star's power into a solid form. What resulted, was a living sphere of Arcanium, the key component to the alloy that the dragonologists had forged to slay the beast.

It was the only thing that could weaken the dragon's armor because that foolish dragon had been so lured in by the power of the star, it had eaten it. As long as the star was inside the dragon, no amount of wounding it would kill it. They would need to incapacitate the beast with the largest projectile ever made, then his team would cut their way into the belly of the beast and remove the fallen star.

However, the manufacture of such a weapon would need a huge quantity of the very rare metal that the composite material was made of. A metal that could only be found in that kind of supply far across the ocean in Zebreca. It would be wildly expensive to ship all the materials across the ocean. Most of their ships were not designed to travel that great a distance. They would have to develop entirely new kinds of ships to transport that much Arcanium! This year’s budget was the largest to date and included funding for a new railway track to the mountain. A second track was deemed necessary, as the original track could no longer support the increasing traffic. (The tribute demanded by the dragon-tyrant had increased to one hundred thousand human beings, to be delivered to the foot of the mountain every evening at the onset of dark.)

When the budget was finally approved, however, reports were coming from a remote part of the country that villages were suffering from a goblin infestation the likes of which no one had ever seen before. The king had to leave urgently to mobilize his army and ride off to defeat this new threat. The anti-dragonists’ appeal was filed away in a dusty cabinet in the castle basement while this more immediate threat was dealt with. But that story is the legend of the Goblin Slayer, a story for another time.

The anti-dragonists met again to decide what was to be done. The debate was animated and continued long into the night. It was almost daybreak when they finally resolved to take the matter to the people. Over the following weeks, they traveled around the country, gave public lectures, and explained their proposal to anyone who would listen. At first, people were skeptical. They had been taught in school that the dragon-tyrant was invincible and that the sacrifices it demanded had to be accepted as a fact of life. Yet when they learned about the new composite material and the heart of the dragon's power, many became intrigued. In increasing numbers, citizens flocked to the anti-dragonist lectures. Activists started organizing public rallies in support of the proposal.

When the new King whose own father had been sacrificed to the dragon read about these meetings in the newspaper, he summoned his advisors and asked them what they thought about it. They informed him about the petitions that had been sent but told him that the anti-dragonists were troublemakers whose teachings were causing public unrest. It was much better for the social order, they said, that the people accepted the inevitability of the dragon-tyrant tribute. The dragon-administration provided many jobs that would be lost if the dragon was slaughtered. There was no known social good coming from the conquest of the dragon. In any case, the king’s coffers were currently nearly empty after the two military campaigns and the funding set aside for the second railway line. The king, who was at the time enjoying great popularity for having vanquished the rattlesnake infestation, listened to his advisors’ arguments but worried that he might lose some of his popular support if was seen to ignore the anti-dragonist petition. He, therefore, decided to hold an open hearing. Leading dragonologists, ministers of the state, and interested members of the public were invited to attend.

The meeting took place on the darkest day of the year, just before the yule holidays, in the largest hall of the royal castle. The hall was packed to the last seat and people were crowding in the aisles. The mood was charged with an earnest intensity normally reserved for pivotal wartime sessions. After the king had welcomed everyone, he gave the floor to the leading Arcanist behind the anti-dragonist proposal, a woman with a serious, almost stern expression on her face. She proceeded to explain in clear language how the proposed device would work and how the requisite amount of the composite material could be manufactured. Given the requested amount of funding, it should be possible to complete the work in fifteen to twenty years. With an even greater amount of funding, it might be possible to do it in as little as twelve years. However, there could be no guarantee that it would work. The crowd followed her presentation intently.

Next to speak was the king’s chief advisor for morality, a man with a booming voice that easily filled the auditorium:

“Let us grant that this woman is correct about the magic and that the project is technologically possible, although I don’t accept that this has actually been proven. Now she desires that we get rid of the dragon. Presumably, she thinks she’s got the right not to be chewed up by the dragon. How willful and presumptuous. The finitude of human life is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not. Getting rid of the dragon, which might seem like such a convenient thing to do, would undermine our human dignity. The preoccupation with killing the dragon will deflect us from realizing more fully the aspirations to which our lives naturally point, from living well rather than merely staying alive. It is debasing, yes debasing, for a person to want to continue his or her mediocre life for as long as possible without worrying about some of the higher questions about what life is to be used for. But I tell you, the nature of the dragon is to eat people, and our own species-specified nature is truly and nobly fulfilled only by getting eaten by it...”

The audience listened respectfully to this highly decorated speaker. The phrases were so eloquent that it was hard to resist the feeling that some deep thoughts must lurk behind them, although nobody could quite grasp what they were. Surely, words coming from such a distinguished appointee of the king must have profound substance.

The speaker next in line was a spiritual sage who was widely respected for his kindness and gentleness as well as for his devotion. As he strode to the podium, a small boy yelled out from the audience: “The dragon is bad!”

The boy’s parents turned bright red and began hushing and scolding the child. But the sage said, “Let the boy speak. He is probably wiser than an old fool like me.”

At first, the boy was too scared and confused to move. But when he saw the genuinely friendly smile on the sage’s face and the outreached hand, he obediently took it and followed the sage up to the podium. “Now, there’s a brave little man,” said the sage. “Are you afraid of the dragon?“

“I want my granny back,” said the boy.

“Did the dragon take your granny away?”

“Yes,” the boy said, tears welling up in his large frightened eyes. “Granny promised that she would teach me how to bake gingerbread cookies for Yule. She said that we would make a little house out of gingerbread and little gingerbread men that would live in it. Then those people in white clothes came and took Granny away to the dragon... The dragon is bad and it eats people… I want my Granny back!”

At this point, the child was crying so hard that the sage had to return him to his parents.

There were several other speakers that evening, but the child’s simple testimony had punctured the rhetorical balloon that the king’s ministers had tried to inflate. The people were backing the anti-dragonists, and by the end of the evening, even the king had come to recognize the reason and the humanity of their cause. In his closing statement, he simply said: “Let’s do it!”

As the news spread, celebrations erupted in the streets. Those who had been campaigning for the anti-dragonists toasted each other and drank to the future of humanity.

The next morning, a billion people woke up and realized that their turn to be sent to the dragon would come before the projectile would be completed. A tipping point was reached. Whereas before, active support for the anti-dragonist cause had been limited to a small group of visionaries, it now became the number one priority and concern on everybody’s mind. The abstract notion of “the general will” took on an almost tangible intensity and concreteness. Mass rallies raised money for the projectile project and urged the king to increase the level of state support. The king responded to these appeals. In his New Year address, he announced that he would pass an extra appropriations bill to support the project at a high level of funding; additionally, he would sell off his summer castle and some of his land and make a large personal donation. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of freeing the world from the ancient scourge of the dragon-tyrant.”

Thus started a great technological race against time. The concept of an anti-dragon projectile was simple, but to make it a reality required solutions to a thousand smaller technical problems, each of which required dozens of time-consuming steps and missteps. Test-missiles were fired but fell dead to the ground or flew off in the wrong direction. In one tragic accident, a wayward missile landed on a hospital and killed several hundred patients and staff when the arcane fire spread to the surrounding blocks. But there was now a real seriousness of purpose, and the tests continued even as the corpses were being dug out from the debris.

Despite almost unlimited funding and round-the-clock work by the technicians, the king’s deadline could not be met. The decade concluded and the dragon was still alive and well. But the effort was getting closer. A prototype missile had been successfully test-fired. Production of the core, made of the expensive composite material, was on schedule for its completion to coincide with the finishing of the fully tested and debugged missile shell into which it was to be loaded. The launch date was set to the following year’s New Year’s Eve, exactly twelve years after the project’s official inauguration. The best-selling Yule gift that year was a calendar that counted down the days to time zero, the proceeds going to the projectile project.

The king had undergone a personal transformation from his earlier frivolous and thoughtless self. He now spent as much time as he could in the laboratories and the manufacturing plants, encouraging the workers and praising their toil. Sometimes he would bring a sleeping bag and spend the night on a noisy machine floor. He even studied and tried to understand the technical aspects of their work. Yet he confined himself to giving moral support and refrained from meddling in technical and managerial matters.

Seven days before New Year, the woman who had made the case for the project almost twelve years earlier, and was now its chief executive, came to the royal castle and requested an urgent audience with the king. When the king got her note, he excused himself to the foreign dignitaries whom he was reluctantly entertaining at the annual Yule dinner and hurried off to the private room where the Arcanist was waiting. As always of late, she looked pale and worn from her long working hours. This evening, however, the king also thought he could detect a ray of relief and satisfaction in her eyes.

She told him that the missile had been deployed, the core had been loaded, everything had been triple-checked, they were ready to launch, and would the king give his final go-ahead. The king sank in an armchair and closed his eyes. He was thinking hard.

By launching the projectile tonight, one week early, seven hundred thousand people would be saved. Yet if something went wrong, if it missed its target and hit the mountain instead, it would be a disaster. A new core would have to be constructed from scratch and the project would be set back by some four years.

He sat there, silently, for almost an hour. Just as the Arcanist had become convinced that he had fallen asleep, he opened his eyes and said in a firm voice: “No. I want you to go right back to the lab. I want you to check and then re-check everything again.” The Arcanist could not help a sigh escaping, but she nodded and left.

The last day of the year was cold and overcast, but there was no wind, which meant good launch conditions. The sun was setting. Technicians were scuttling around making the final adjustments and giving everything one last check. The king and his closest advisors were observing from a platform close to the launch pad. Further away, behind a fence, large numbers of the public had assembled to witness the great event. A large clock was showing the countdown: fifty minutes to go.

An advisor tapped the king on the shoulder and drew his attention to the fence. There was some tumult. Somebody had jumped the fence and was running towards the platform where the king sat. Security quickly caught up with him. He was handcuffed and taken away. The king turned his attention back to the launch pad, and too the mountain in the background. In front of it, he could see the dark slumped profile of the dragon. It was eating.

Some twenty minutes later, the king was surprised to see the handcuffed man reappearing a short distance from the platform. His nose was bleeding and he was accompanied by two security guards. The man appeared to be in a frenzied state. When he spotted the king, he began shouting at the top of his lungs: “The last train! The last train! Stop the last train!”

“Who is this young man?” said the king. “His face seems familiar, but I cannot quite place him. What does he want? Let him come up.”

The young man was a junior clerk in the ministry of transportation, and the reason for his frenzy was that he had discovered that his father was on the last train to the mountain. The king had ordered the train traffic to continue, fearing that any disruption might cause the dragon to stir and leave the open field in front of the mountain where it now spent most of its time. The young man begged the king to issue a recall-order for the last train, which was due to arrive at the mountain terminal five minutes before time zero.

“I cannot do it,” said the king, “I cannot take the risk.”

“But the trains frequently run five minutes late. The dragon won’t notice! Please!”

The young man was kneeling before the king, imploring him to save his father’s life and the lives of the other thousand passengers onboard that last train.

The king looked down at the pleading, bloodied face of the young man. But he bit his lip and shook his head. The young man continued to wail even as the guards carried him off the platform: “Please! Stop the last train! Please!”

The king stood silent and motionless, until, after a while, the wailing suddenly ceased. The king looked up and glanced over at the countdown clock: five minutes remaining.

Four minutes. Three minutes. Two minutes.

The last technician left the launch pad.

30 seconds. 20 seconds. Ten, nine, eight…

As a ball of fire enveloped the launch pad and the missile shot out, the spectators instinctively rose to the tips of their toes, and all eyes fixated at the front end of the white flame from the rocket’s blue arcane afterburners heading towards the distant mountain. The masses, the king, the low and the high, the young and the old, it was as if at this moment they shared a single awareness, a single conscious experience: that white flame, shooting into the dark, embodying the human spirit, its fear, and its hope… striking at the heart of evil. The projectile's high Arcanite content cracked the Dragon's armor and caused it to roar in pain as the heart within the beast shot metal spikes outward reaching towards its missing essence.

The rocket accelerated, drawn by the pull of the dragon's unholy heart and struck true in his chest. The wound ripped open as the metal from the magical rocket pulled itself free of the alloy forced its way into the body of the dragon. The unexpected interaction gave the Demon Guards their chance as the beast lay on its side pinned to the mountain by the spear of magic and metal.

The team of Demons raced into the open wound of the massive beast, some of them melting when their magic faltered, some of them dying from freight in the presence of the beasts aura of terror but one man, one hero, the grandson of the Demon's Hand leader who's discoveries had made this all possible, he survived and plunged an enchanted rope deep into the core of the liquid-metal star.

He crawled from the sound of the beast soaked in the dragon's unholy blood and fell into a troth of holy water, "Go! Go!" he yelled and the train which had carried so many to their death reversed. That train took one more life as the power of the arcane engine pulled star's heart out of the belly of the beast.

Back in the capital, the silhouette on the horizon tumbled and fell. A thousand voices of pure joy rose from the assembled masses, joined seconds later by a deafening drawn-out thud from the collapsing monster as if the Earth itself was drawing a sigh of relief. After centuries of oppression, civilization was, at last, was free from the cruel tyranny of the dragon. The joy cry resolved into a jubilating chant: “Long live the king! Long live us all!” The king’s advisors, like everybody that night, were as happy as children; they embraced each other and congratulated the king: “We did it! We did it!”

But the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn me, why did I start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.” The king stepped off the platform and walked up to a young peasant girl, who was sitting on the ground in shock. There he fell on his knees. “Forgive me! Please forgive me! Someone forgive me!” he wailed long into the night.

“It’s not your fault,” replied the man in handcuffs. “Do you remember twenty years ago in the castle? That crying little boy who wanted you to bring back his grandmother – that was me. I didn’t realize then that your father couldn’t possibly do what I asked for.

Today I wanted you to save my father. Yet it was impossible to do that now, without jeopardizing the launch. But you have saved my life, and my mother and my sister. How can we ever thank you enough for that?”

“Listen to them,” said the king, gesturing towards the crowds. “They are cheering me for what happened tonight. But the hero is you. You cried out. You rallied us against evil.” The king signaled a guard to come to escort the man home, “Now, go to your mother and sister. You and your family shall always be welcome at the court, and anything you wish for – if it be within our power – it shall be granted.”

The young man left, and the royal entourage, huddling in the downpour, accumulated around their monarch who was still kneeling in the mud. Amongst the fancy couture, which was being increasingly ruined by the rain, a bunch of powdered faces expressed a superposition of joy, relief, and discombobulation. So much had changed in the last hour: the right to an open future had been regained, a primordial fear had been abolished, and many a long-held assumption had been overturned. Unsure now about what was required of them in this unfamiliar situation, they stood there tentatively as if probing whether the ground would still hold, exchanging glances, and waiting for some kind of indication.

Finally, the king rose, wiping his hands on the sides of his pants. “Your majesty, what do we do now?” ventured the most senior courtier.

“My dear friend,” said the King, “we have come a long way… yet our journey has only just begun. Our species are young on this planet. Today we are like children again. The future lies open before us. We shall go into this future and try to do better than we have done in the past. We have time now – time to get things right, time to grow up, time to learn from our mistakes, time for the slow process of building a better world, and time to get settled in it. Tonight, let all the bells in the kingdom ring until midnight, in remembrance of our dead forbears, and then after midnight let us celebrate till the sun comes up. And in the coming days… I believe we have some reorganization to do. Bring me the heroes who pulled the heart from the dragon. With this new age, we must have a new King. The old ways will not do, not anymore. It is time to build a new legacy. ”