King Lykaon

* Tobio Ikuse

**Lykaon**, or **Lykaon of Marchosias**, is the legendary cambion who created the werewolf-kind and is revered by his creations as their god. While he was slain, his soul and consiousness live on in the Longinus **Canis Lykaon**, which was his former sword.

## Appearance

Lykaon appears in Tobio's mindscape as a giant monstrous wolf similar to a hellhound but is much larger, as his head alone is three times the size of Shinjuku Railway Station. He has pure-black fur like everlasting darkness, four blood-red eyes blazing with hellfire, and fangs as large as a giant. Giant wound-like holes scattered across his body, and from them, giant pools of lava pouring out like waterfalls.

In his human life, he was an inhumanly handsome young man, with reddish-brown hair and twinkling eyes as blue as the summer sky. When he was killed, the head of a direwolf was sewn on his body as a mockery against his reign.

## Personality

According to legends, before he was betrayed and killed, Lykaon was a great king with a keen sense of honor and justice. He ruled over his kingdom and his people not with an iron fist, but with duties, responsibility, and fulfilled promises, which led to the smallfolk to love and worship him as if he was a god.

However, everything changed when he was killed, as his entire existence was filled with righteous vengeance that "darken the world and then some more". He became a conqueror and a tyrant when he was resurrected, even transforming his people into the first werewolves to act as his armies, and had them kidnapped and raped young maidens to procreate in order to increase the size of his formidable armies.

His heart becomes so ruthless and wicked that when he was sealed within the Canis Lykaon, the once Enochian sword became twisted and turned into a Faustian sword brimming with demonic energy and the desire to "slash and kill indiscriminately", something that neither the Biblical God nor the angels thought could happen.

However, some tales of his more honorable characteristics still lived on as he became a god in the eyes of the werewolves and many other therianthropic species. According to Theon, while he might be an Evil God in the eyes of others, to werewolves like them, he is still their creator and their god, and thus, should always be treated with the respect and reverence that he deserves.

Due to his death, he becomes extremely cruel and merciless against those who violate sacred hospitality and dares to harm their guests or their honor in any way. Because of this, hospitality becomes a crucial point within werewolf culture, to the point where even the most heretical and blasphemous of werewolves wouldn't dare to harm their worst enemies under guest rights.

## History

### The Wolf-King Myth

The only information about his background is covered in the tale called the Wolf-King myth, which dates back to a time before gods and men. Because of its antiquity, there are multiple versions of it spread out across numerous werewolf clans across the world.

Once, the Wolf-King was born to the "King-of-Rivers-and-Mountains" and the Goddess-Carved-From-Moonlight. As he grew up, he became a wise and just ruler whose people loved and adored him, singing to him praises day and night, and throwing him flowers every time he walked down the streets to ask and care for the lives of the smallfolks.

When he was a hundred-winters-old, he married a Wolf-Queen from the Lands-Beneath-the-Ground where the spirits of the dead dwell, and had with her fifty brave princes and fifty fair princesses. Because of their beauty, people from all across the world would come to ask for their hands in marriage, from the kings of men to the gods in the heavens above, but because of their youth, the king refused them all.

One day, a witch-prince came and asked the same and was rejected like all who came before him. Angered, he cursed the family that on the day a wedding happened, they would all be betrayed by his own people, which earned him the ire of the court and he was stoned to death on his way out of the kingdom. Despite his counsellors' advice, he ignored the curse and forgot about it until a long time later, when he wed his youngest son to a foreign king to end the war between their kingdoms.

In the feast, his people had their guest rights broken and were cruelly killed by his goodson, who killed him with his own sword, Blackfyre, before the traitorous king used it to kill his husband. His head and the heads of his sons and daughters were then chopped and direwolf heads were sewn in, and their mutilated corpses were paraded across the kingdoms.

Furious by her son's death, not because of his murder but because of his broken guest rights, the Goddess-Carved-From-Moonlight resurrected him in the form of a giant wolf with "wickedness in his heart". He then massacred the entire kingdom who betrayed his family and devoured his traitorous goodson whole before turning back to a man and returned to his kingdom a changed man.

From a good king who loved his people and honored the gods, he became a devil whose people were turned into wolfmen to serve his armies and became the gods' enemy, and he was struck down by the White God. His soul was then sealed in his own sword and the sword was then thrown into eternal darkness, and the tale of the Wolf-King ended here.

### Canis Lykaon

According to Azazel, the general myth of the Wolf-King is mostly correct, though there are several mistakes here and there when it comes to the characters' origins, which he admitted would be an undoubted fact due to its antiquity.

The king was not a normal man, but instead a cambion, a half-demon, and the Goddess-Carved-From-Moonlight was Marchosias, a demon in the form of a giant hellhound. The Wolf-Queen was, according to him, not just his wife but also a creation of Marchosias and possibly a cardinal devil of the Marchosias Clan, as the children of her was undoubtedly all pureblood devils, which he himself knew as he was one of their suitors, an unnamed "god" in the myth.

The tragic events that followed were mostly the same, though the White God here was revealed to be the Biblical God who decapitated him with a sword formed of silver and lightning, and the sword he was sealed into was none other than Canis Lykaon, which was "thrown into eternal darkness", i.e. turned into a Longinus and became a part of the Sacred Gear System.

## Trivia

* Despite popular belief, he isn't the same figure as King Lycaon of Greco-Roman mythology.
* His name, Lykaon, is often given to the strongest Alpha Werewolf in the world.
* In some versions of the myth, the Wolf-Queen was his sister-wife.
* Some legends said that his sons and daughters were also resurrected and became ancestors to the 100 pureblood werewolf clans.
* It's implied that his myth dated back since antediluvian times and became wide-spread because of the First Men who relocated to Earth after the Deluge.