Name: The Brenin Llwyd contends that he has never had a name, as "Craig ap Pwyll" was merely what his adopted village called him, and the name that his mother held for him in her heart died when she did. When he became a great Lord of the Dark, he assumed the title of Brenin Llwyd, and as far as he is concerned, that is his name, title, and only label. You, like Will Stanton, would be best off addressing him as "Your grey Majesty", little girl.

Position: The Grey King, Lord of Stone, Ruler of Mountains, the most boringest nexus of grey evil since Eichmann.

Appearance: First of all, it doesn't matter what he looks like. He could be as ugly as sin or as handsome as Taye Diggs, and it wouldn't matter one sausage because you don't see the average dark-Welshman he used to be. He is grey, and cold, and terrible, and grey. When you look at him, you will never be able to hold his features in your mind for as long as a second: everything blurs into everything else, like a Picasso done in the Oh God Waaaaah Grey Period. You could look into his eyes, as you cannot look for long into the eyes of the Rider, and you will find dull, dull, dull grey.

It is not scary.

It is terrifying, in a way that Sartre would have appreciated.

He is grey, and cold, and terrible, and grey. His voice is harsh, and cold, and deep, like unto the rumble of an avalanche; his voice is sweet, and cold, and whisper-soft, like the icy breeze presaging the breath of the Grey King.

The Grey King -- This is creepily cool. By Irk.

This was my birthday present. -- And it gave me a belly-laugh, too. By Ali.

Faking It In The Real World

Age/Birthday/Whatnot: No one knows when he was born; the year is lost, and the date was indistinguishable from any other day in the life of a Welsh peasant back then. The sun rose, work was done, a baby was born -- it was supremely unimportant, and no one knew or cared for the day.

In The Grey King, Will Stanton mentions that the Grey King had dwelt in his peak at Cader Idris since "the beginnings of time". Fair enough. We'll assume this to mean "since people could remember" and place the birth of the Grey King at "somewhere after the Black Rider, but before the coming of the Romans into Britain". This gives us some span to work with, but the Grey King cannot be younger than two thousand years old.

It does not really matter, to the Grey King's way of thinking; he's been there since he can recall, which is, of course, the only really significant standard of measurement.

Friends and Family:

The Grey King, damn it, doesn't like people.

There are, however, various persons he will tolerate to be near him for certain periods of time.

One of these is Hebog (HEH-boc), the Falcon, the most favored servant of the Grey King. He was human once, and probably if you caught him in a soft light, you might think that he is human still, until you look into his cold, bright grey eyes. He is a tall, slim man with a thin face and keen eyes; he wears a sky-blue robe and has a voice that ought by rights to grace a serpent rather than a falcon. He is one of the three Lords who hold the Harp of Gold, but when outside that duty, his allegiance lies wholly with the Brenin Llwyd, and shares much of His Greyness's counsel and plans. He acts as factotum and majordomo in Cader Idris; if there's something that requires His Greyness' attention, you can be sure that Hebog was likely the one to alert Brenin Llwyd to it. He was once one of those who climbed Cader Idris in search of the wisdom of the Great Bard. Instead, he found the Brenin Llwyd, and was told of the power of the Dark, and gave himself willingly to greyness and shadow.

The Grey King likewise commands the grey foxes, or the milgwn of the hills. They are large, clever, crafty; they are, of course, only animals, but their leader, the king fox, takes his directives straight from the Grey King, and can carry out astonishingly detailed plans. The teeth of the milgwn are as sharp as guilt, and their malice is palpable. They don't like you, no matter who you are, and they are willing to prove it if you encroach on their space. They will carry messages for the Grey King, hear and see and bear things for him, and they will eat your pet hamster if you mess around.

Usual Daily Routine:

I could tell you, but you'd fall off your chair in boredom.

... ... ... No, really. The Grey King sits on his throne in the heart of Cader Idris and emits depressium. That is his BASIC. DAILY. ROUTINE. For two thousand-odd years.

And then you stupid tree-girls come running in and the Black Rider says the Dark is Rising here and now and in general his entire schedule is shot to hell and he has to make up PLANS to counter YOUR STUPID SEARCHING AFTER SOME STUPID CAULDRON that doesn't even concern him and he hates you all goddammit.

Background:

Once upon a time, a long time ago, before Paris was invented and General Franco was still not dead, a glazy-eyed woman wandered into the village that would later be called Tywyn. She was heavily pregnant, and she was Not From Around There, and that was all that could be readily ascertained from her. She died without having uttered a word, and her baby was cut from her womb when its kicking alerted the women who were dressing the body that the babe still lived.

A child born of a dead mother is fantastically unlucky, and a sizable minority of the villagers wanted to leave the child out to the elements. Mercy, pity, and compassion saved the day -- woohoo! -- and the child (a long scrawny pale thing) was given to the woman who had clamored loudest to keep the poor thing alive: the wife of the village stonemason.

Gladys had no children of her own, something that had always crushed her, and she lavished love on the child. When he had survived to his first birthday, he was given a name: Craig, or "rock". He had, or so his adopted mother fondly said, the patience of one. He was what people call, vaguely, a good baby: never fussed and rarely cried, and seemed to stare at things owlishly and unblinkingly even before he could focus his eyes. Gladys's husband Pwyll was never too wildly enthusiastic about Craig, but even he conceded that the strange child wasn't too much trouble to have around.

And Craig was strange. He didn't reciprocate affection, and if Gladys tried to hug him he would only stand passively and wait until she was done fussing at him before going on his way and doing whatever he'd been doing before she'd had to come interrupt him with her silly embrace. He did what he was told, and learned quickly; he said little, and gave away less of what he was thinking. More, he looked strange. Among the small, lithe, dark people of Gwynedd, the tall, broad-shouldered, pale-skinned and pale-eyed Craig stood out like... Legolas in the Shire, really, only not nearly as pretty.

He did not care about the village, or Gladys, or Pwyll, or anything further than he himself continuing to live fairly well and comfortably; to that end, he did not volunteer his opinions of the villagers (morons, the lot of them) or of what they valued (sheep are almost stupider than people, but at least they don't talk). He merely stayed silent, and stared, and went for long hikes among the tall peaks above Tal y Llyn.

He didn't offend, but neither did he exactly please, and when Pwyll grudgingly took on Craig as his apprentice a huge sigh of relief went around with the other villagers who had dreaded the day when the strange one might come around asking if he might learn what they had to teach.

Craig took to masonry like a duck takes to two parts hydrogen one part oxygen. Under his hands stones seemed to leap into place, and after a while he left off using mortar at all. His affinity for the stone, the knowing and the placing of it, was by no means totally unique in the whole history of the world -- the Roman engineers were neat, too, as were the Druid-blokes who set up Stonehenge, and we've heard good things about this Macchu Picchu crowd down in the New World -- but for that time and place, he was something else. Things built out of stone by Craig stayed up, by cracky. Come earthquakes, fires, floods, VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS!!! (.... O_o sorry), those suckers stayed UP and impassive, as if they were miniature hollowed-out squared little mountains that people could live in.

People began to speak well of him, when they bothered to remember him. Even then he was so horribly grey. "That Craig," they would say to each other, snug in their well-built sturdy warm little homes, "he might be quiet and strange and I'm practically certain that he could fork the Evil Eye at us if he felt like it, but he can build."

Quite often this might have been met with "... Craig? Craig? ... Oh, right, him. ... Grey laddie. Builds well. Now, about those three sheep you owe me....", but occasionally, from those who remembered that he had been delivered of a dead mother, and that Pwyll had died under a rockslide one day, and that Gladys was now blind and shriveled and seemed afraid of the adopted son whom she'd once adored, there might come a quiet, ".... Grey ain't our sort of color."

Craig had not killed Pwyll, even if some unkind folk seemed to recall that Craig had come down from the hills with a curiously unconcerned face to report that his adopted father was buried under an avalanche of slate, and Gladys was so lost in the grey maze of her old memories that she seemed frightened of the wind at the door, much less her adopted son... but all the same, it seemed uncanny and strange, and all of it weighed in heavily once the debacle with the shrine came about.

The Welsh, like the old Romans and Etruscans, were prone to building small shrines at the boundaries of land -- small cairns of stones stacked together, with a level top where one might leave gifts and offerings to the small gods of line and mark and tree and brook.

Quite often these cairns would be constructed with more love and reverence than with skill, and might consequently look rather ... less than perfect. Especially to someone as bloody perfectionist as the village's new stonemason, who was prone to wandering around outside the village where he didn't have to actually talk to people who'd corner him to ask him what he thought about the weather or other such stupidities.

Craig had never paid much attention to the village religion; as far as he was concerned, it was merely another bit on that long list of things that he considered irrelevant to what he was doing. It was the sort of thing that only moronic zeroes did. Consequently, when he saw a pile of stones in a haphazard stack under a rowan, ... he saw only a pile of stones.

Craig did not like random piles of stones; they were messy and slipshod, and really it was just no way to treat perfectly good rock.

He took the little cairn apart, tossing the withered little bouquet of flowers atop it over his left shoulder, and rebuilt it as best he knew how, which was a lot better than it had been. He finished, stood up, nodded to himself -- "Uh-HUH, now that is a fine pile of stones" -- and went on his way.

The next day a premature frost killed the harvest.

Since, of course, most horrific catastrophes were understood to have been caused by a mortal displeasing the gods, there was a general outcry as to what could possibly have done it.

It didn't take long for the shrine's renovation to become known, and when it did, there was again a very large minority of villagers who wanted Craig left out for the gods; they were outvoted by the merciful majority who stated that they'd rather give Craig the choice of leaving forever, or being left out for the gods.

Craig did not much seem to care. "Where shall I go, then?" was the only thing he said during his kangaroo court trial.

"Go jump off a mountain," someone muttered. (We suspect it was Gwion, one of the hunters, who had always thought that Craig's long black braid was slightly sissy.)

Mountains. What a good idea. They were full of stone. They were cold, they were starkly devoid of anything likely to attract other people, and they ... were high. If Craig went to the great grey peaks arching over the still waters of Tal y Llyn, he would always look down on the zeros, literally as well as figuratively...

He went.

He saw.

He was conquered.

Craig was not hateful -- hate is too strong, too deep, an emotion to readily lend itself to Craig's dispassionate nature -- but he was slightly bitter as he evaluated his disenfranchised status. All of this, and only for making things right, proper, and orderly. People were idiots. They didn't know what they wanted, and if they did, they wouldn't know how to get it. Someone ought to do them all a favor and return them to dust; at least it would stop them from making such slipshod piles of beautiful, stable stone.

He found himself wondering, as a purely intellectual exercise, what might happen if he were to start a rockslide from the ledge high on Cader Idris where he had chosen his home.

"Not quite enough damage to make it worthwhile," said a still, small, grey voice: sweet and terrible and echoing inside Craig's skull without taking the trouble to pass through the air on sound waves first.

Craig did not jump or start at this. When one has absolutely ZIP in the way of imagination, supernatural voices out of nowhere do very little to frighten one.

"I would need to be able to move the entire mountain to be able to destroy it all," he acknowledged, and waited, turning a small piece of quartz over and over in his long strong deft hands.

"You can have the power to move the mountains," suggested the voice.

"And the price?"

The voice answered. "Stay. Rule. And eventually guard."

Thus died Craig. Thus was born Brenin Llwyd.

He stayed. He rules. He guards.

And he does not like anyone who lives in his valley, ringed by his mountains; they are, or so he seems to recall, prone to making asinine decisions about everything. And he especially doesn't like you, little girl.