The king who was a cage

THE CRYPT HE OPENED

As a young man he found the wrong door and unlocked the war.

He found one of the three Wyrdkeys hidden in Elena Galathynius's tomb beneath the glass castle and carried it to Morath, where Perrington led him down to a sealed crypt. He put the key into the sarcophagus that Gavin and Elena had sealed a thousand years earlier — and freed Erawan. The Valg king took Perrington's body; a Valg minion took his; the man he had been was erased inside his own skin. Everything the reader will spend four books hating the King for begins here, with a curious young man opening a box that had a demon-god folded up inside it.

THE MAN INSIDE THE MONSTER

Even collared, the human in him fought to shield his own son.

Possessed, he conquered nearly all of Erilea in a decade — Eyllwe, Melisande, Fenharrow — and magic itself vanished from the land. But the vanishing was his own doing, and it was not the demon's plan: the human still trapped inside built three Wyrdstone clock towers to drain magic from the whole continent, partly against the Valg's will, so the demons could not find powerful living hosts to wear. Chief among the hosts he feared them finding was his son Dorian. The tyrant outlawing magic across a continent was, in the very same act, a father hiding one boy.

WHAT HE TOOK FROM TERRASEN

One coordinated night, and a whole royal house was simply gone.

Ten years before the series opens, the King ordered the decapitation of House Galathynius: King Orlon killed in his bed at Orynth, Prince Rhoe and Evalin Ashryver murdered at their Florine estate the same night. Their daughter survived only because Marion Lochan died buying her escape, and the child fell into the river to become Celaena. Later he sentenced that same girl — Adarlan's Assassin, secretly the heir he thought he had erased — to the salt mines of Endovier, where most people lasted three months. She lasted a year, and he built the very contest that pulled her back out, never once knowing what he'd caught.

COLLARED, AND FREED IN DEATH

The cruelest thing he did was to his own son. So was the last mercy.

He locked a black Wyrdstone collar around Dorian's neck and let a Valg prince ride him — leaving Dorian awake and present for every second of it. In the throne room, his raw Wyrdstone power paralysed Chaol from the waist down for good, and he revealed that Erawan now wore Perrington's face. Then Dorian broke his own collar, killed the demon inside himself, and killed his father — and in dying, the human King was finally let go. Aelin shattered the glass castle and turned its killing rain of glass harmless with fire. The monster died, and so did the man it had been eating for thirty years.