The Black Tome

The Shadow King

Properties2
tagscharacter
aliasesAgdrel, Agdrel the Shadow

12 min read

First appearance: Skypiercer Part 1

The Shadow King, born Agdrel, is the great villain of D20 Deathmatch and the uncle of the Grandmaster. He killed his own brother to take the throne, ruled The Void for three centuries by draining the magic out of everyone around him, and spent a long stretch as the soul inside The Box of Chaos. When he clawed his way back, he ran the Deathmatches himself for a whole season. He killed winners, smoked ribs and got very, very into Bop-It. He is played by Mudcat.

Story

The Night of the Long Shadow and the Reign of the Shadow King

Before he was a king, he was Agdrel the Shadow, a great warrior with his Dragon Knights. He was the brother of Faucius Golden Shield, Elusia’s father. He fought beside Faucius in the Chaos Wars and later claimed his brother could never have won them without him. He loved Elusia’s mother, his sister-in-law, which made things complicated, since he also killed her husband. On the Night of the Long Shadow, about 700 years before the first Deathmatch of Season 1, Agdrel murdered Faucius and seized The Dread Fortress. Elusia was sent away from the Void that same night.

He reigned for 300 years “with an iron fist.” He built a mage school of thousands and taught Vythorn the arts of magic. Vythorn called him “my … mentor in the arts.” The school had a darker purpose. The Shadow King killed the parents of many chaos-gifted children, fostered the orphans, and siphoned off their refined chaos energy, and Vythorn’s parents were among his victims. He fed on the life and chaos of his own acolytes and stole power from mages across the realms. The stolen energy was too much for him to contain. By the time of Skypiercer, people whispered that his mind was decaying, and his slipping grip on chaos was spawning tornadoes, earthquakes, eruptions and failing harvests across the Void. He had even left his staff, Life Stealer, behind at Atheranon.

Skypiercer

In Skypiercer Part 2, Elusia returned to find a shadowed figure sitting on her father’s throne. In the finale, uncle and niece finally faced each other. He insisted he had been the real parent in her life:

“I was more of a father to you than he was… I raised you.”

The claim stuck. Ever after, he called her “daughter.” Elusia, fighting alongside Atalantos and Kaja, killed him and became Grandmaster. Vythorn spared what was left: he made the Box of Chaos and sealed the Shadow King’s soul inside it. The box’s name, Gerald, is an anagram of Agdrel.

The Return (Season 3 Finale)

The Box of Chaos was not a safe prison. The piece of the Shadow King that Vythorn kept slowly worked on his mind and manipulated him, and the King’s body was rebuilt from the offerings fed to the box. At the end of the Season 3 finale, he came out. He slaughtered the goblins in the throne room, chained Elusia, took her throne and summoned dozens of Dragon Knights. Then he killed the Arbiter, who had stepped in front of his attack on Doug, the Grandmaster’s pug. He finished by forcing Elusia to kneel.

Season 4: The Shadow King’s Reign

Season 4 belonged to him. Elusia was the Grandmaster in name only. He kept her in gold rune bracelets, then shadowy chains he liked to tighten (“It’s because I love you”). He also gave her a cursed plane-opening amulet, which she used to summon each week’s champions. In Shadows Reign, his first time hosting a Deathmatch, he raised Atalantos and Kaja with cursed magic and set Elusia’s old companions against each other. He explained he had been studying “what became of everyone after our little spat years ago.” He rebuilt the Box of Chaos by stuffing the soul of Robert Hartley into the empty box. His very first chaos roll came up a 1. Then he killed Kaja, who had been Elusia’s love, and called it her “birthday gift.”

He was new at this and it showed. He skipped chaos events, lost track of turns and forgot the Sunday Deathmatch entirely. His cruelty never slipped, though. Each week he primed the Box of Chaos by killing an Acolyte and taking their soul. He crushed them with shadow hands, beheaded them, ripped them in half, ripped out one Acolyte’s head and spine (and wanted dice made from her bones), pulped one on a pool table, shot another into the box as an arrow and murdered Blissful Dwarf outright. Later in the season he started picking sacrifices from the crowd at random. He also made a habit of killing the winners. He liked Evah’s fighting style, then killed her anyway after she beat Richardo. He stomped Grickle flat with a giant black boot after Grickle’s win over Witch Hunter. He incinerated the winner of Fatale versus Claudia with “my grandmother’s recipe.” He sent Storm on the Horizon into space on a spectral falcon after the win over Grug the Wizard. When asked, he flatly refused to promise not to kill the winners.

He was also a petty tyrant. He cheated Griff out of his reward after the fight with Cappin Fodder and dismissed the Acolytes. He bragged about killing Vythorn (“almost sorry… He was a great student”), animated Vythorn’s statue, and kept Vythorn’s prismatic spray rings “as mementos.” He botched the Fortress taxes and blamed Vythorn for it. He announced he would cut all employee benefits, and he “definitely didn’t kill HR last week.” He also laid out plans to expand the Dread Fortress across the Void and kill the people already living in the way.

Some of his choices were stranger than cruel. He saved Grug from drowning (“Try not to die too early”) and spared Nonamatt because the Grandmaster was “like a daughter to me.” He honored Misery’s deal with a stone-coffin burial. He locked Ben Zappa in the Box of Chaos, promising to “see what I can do about the rabies.”

Vythorn’s Return

While the Shadow King ruled, Vythorn’s soul fought its way back from death. In the in-between, Vythorn remembered the moment he had spared the dying King, warned that “he works off of the threads of minds,” and feared his old master would murder the Grandmaster. From Ise he learned that the Shadow King had killed his parents with his own hands.

In Vythorn’s Return Part 3, the Shadow King descended from the sky over the arena on his throne and fought with shadow blades sprouting from his arms. He admitted to the whole scheme of murdered parents and harvested orphans. Vythorn unleashed Morir’s Cataclysm, and its maws tore his body away, leaving only a shadow soul with yellow eyes. In the moment Vythorn hesitated, that soul escaped into the chaos storm clouds.

The Season of Fate

In the Season of Fate, a vision of rule that only the Arbiter lived through, the Shadow King was gone but not forgotten. A piece of his soul was found in the Blade of Shadow during Robbie Clark and The Hunger’s match against Bob the Barbarian. Thea summed him up for the newcomers: “an old bad guy… we didn’t like him.” In the vision’s end, Elusia named him the controlling mastermind who had decided Vythorn’s role all along. Afterwards he was described as weakened and gone, “his pieces of body scattered around the hells.”

Pieces of a King

In the real timeline, the Shadow King is believed dead, his remains “scattered across the Void.” The Arbiter is credited with killing him, but there are signs that his power may be accumulating again. His old Dragon Knights became the Shadow Knights, the Order of the Ascendant Shadow. A vision in Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind showed him in his studies of how to master chaos. He weighed whether to sacrifice whole planes, a civilization, or his own kin, such as his niece Elusia. He also learned to put diluted chaos into his own bone marrow.

Personality and Abilities

The Shadow King is a monster who insists he is not one: “I might have killed your friend and taken over… your throne and your empire, but I’m not a monster.” He swings between paternal tenderness toward Elusia and casual murder of everyone else. He calls her “child,” “daughter” and “my niece,” and claims he gave himself tinnitus to tune her out. He says he has known complicated love himself, and he claims he saved orphans, which Elusia points out “was not a good thing.” He doesn’t know the goblins’ names and numbers them instead. In his words, the goblins and civilians “don’t mean a lot to me.”

He is also a deeply strange man to live with. He became obsessed with Bop-It, bopped goblins instead of the toy, and insisted the toys were defective. He once gave Elusia a Bop-It for her birthday when she was twelve. He smokes ribs low and slow with Kansas City sweet sauce, bowls with the goblins, leads painting classes with chinchilla-blood paint, and throws secret solo pre-parties behind the throne with strobes, lasers and a keg. He “recently learned of video games” and plays PlayStation with a twelve-year-old named Danny. He bought the console at Best Buy because the Radio Shack in Prexmarin was closed, and added, “I’ve been in the box for 700 years.” He believes the moon landing was faked (“I know a thing about illusions”) and claims nobody has ever seen him and Criss Angel in the same place. His throne cushions point to a “sensitive ass.” At one point he was given pink spa socks, and others secretly hung bells on his fancy silver-strapped boots.

Behind his face is a black void with yellow eyes, shadow teeth and tentacles. Elusia once covered it with a trash bag. As he explained, “I had skin and then I didn’t have skin and now I have skin again.” He is one of the few true masters of chaos energy in the Void. He can turn incorporeal, dissipate into shadow and teleport through it, and control blood. He can grow giant spectral shadow wings, form shadow blades and shadow fleets, and shape keys from shadow fingers. His eyes glow yellow to see through magical darkness, and with one snap he once gave the whole crowd the same sight. He can transform people, as he did when he turned Traxton into a tarantula, and he keeps the master logbook of deaths, “a log of everything for everyone.” He also keeps a blood cannon under his throne. As the box’s former soul, he knows the Box of Chaos intimately: “I should know, I was it once,” and he calls it “my former home.”

Relationships

  • Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: his niece, whom he claims he raised and calls “daughter”; she killed him, and he later held her captive.
  • Faucius Golden Shield: his brother, whom he murdered on the Night of the Long Shadow.
  • The Arbiter: his former student. He killed Vythorn’s parents and later Vythorn himself, and Vythorn in turn sealed his soul and later destroyed his body.
  • Kaja: Elusia’s companion and love; he raised her with cursed magic and killed her as a “birthday gift.”
  • Atalantos: one of the trio who defeated him; he raised Atalantos to fight Kaja.
  • The Box of Chaos: once his prison and his soul, which he later rebuilt and fed with Acolytes.
  • The Dragon Knights: his warriors before the coup, summoned again on his return, and later the Shadow Knights.
  • Ise: revealed to Vythorn that the Shadow King killed his parents.

Memorable Quotes

Appearances

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