I started this story several months ago and couldnt seem to find a thread to continue it. The main character is a dieing man who was once a King and whose realm was converted into a dark prison, now he desperately tries (using alchemical arts) to win back what was once his...

THE ALCHEMIST KING.

In a once fragrant forest which then turned tumorous and black. Apart from a clan of crows, no birds sang there, and no animal dared walk through its shaded groves. Each bark and branch of every tree, every leaf, knot and fallen seed trembled at a high-pitched wailing, a screeching whistle of manic proportions, which came from deep within the blighted womb of this cancerous scar.

And, on a bed within a decaying hut which leaned to the left, lay a dieing alchemist. His heart was struggling with each step, his breath was a wheezing combat against death, with pale and transparent skin like parchment, and dried rivers of blue-green. His illness… first it had been a strange whisper on the back of his neck, just a sweet-sour brush of wind, but as the day came and went it grew into a sickening caress of a curse, bulbous, dense and pungent… an emblem of decay and a rotting visceral hole that bled and swarmed with tentacles around his neck like a glistening beaded halter, and it strangled his words, breath and sight. The rapid beating of darksome wings glinted ill omens for his future… he knew his time was short.

It was 99 years ago to this day that this man, then a mighty and noble King had tried to defend his realm against an invader, a prince with an army of evil intent. At the eve of his victory in battle a powerful wizard of the enemy, a magician of the deepest and most scorned arts released a devastating and terrible incantation, and this perverted and twisted manipulation of the elements transformed his castle into an impenetrable wood, of which we have just described, and it was so dense that not all of the sun could get through to illuminate it all. His gracious Queen became a honking sow, his army into a horde of shiny black beetles and his son and daughter into beady eyed crows.

And for pure sport and competition the old wizard gave the king a hundred years to unlock the secret of the spell and regain his former life, and if he failed, both he and his wife and children, everything that he owned would be crushed beneath the plague of infectious mold, never to be remembered.

Every day at noon his beloved children the crows had picked shards of sunlight from the floor of the dark forest, and every full moon his army of beetles had mined nuggets of gold from deep within the belly of the mound of his crumbling kingdom, and at the height of every fourth season his wife, the honking sow had stripped each rock of jeweled lichen. All of these ingredients he had put into a cauldron with water like blood, and it bubbled and waited for one more ingredient; a herb with a heart shaped flower which did not grow in the forest. It only grew in the myths that lay beyond the mist of poison which surround and encircled the forest and which imprisoned that king and his family, and for this he had to devise a plan...