Character from Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence
An entity of pure entropy building an army of the dead — the existential threat that makes Jorg's petty conquests irrelevant and his monstrous talents necessary.
The Dead King is the Broken Empire's apocalyptic threat — an intelligence that commands the dead, builds armies from corpses, and works toward the extinction of all living things. It is connected to the data-space — the remnant AI network from the Builder era — and may be a corruption of that system, an emergent intelligence born from the accumulated death data of nuclear war. It is the reason Jorg's empire matters. Without the Dead King's threat, Jorg is just another warlord in a land of warlords. With it, Jorg's drive to conquer becomes the only force capable of unifying the Hundred Kingdoms against extinction. The monster you know versus the monster you don't. The Dead King doesn't negotiate. It doesn't monologue. It simply accumulates. Its patience is geological. Its army grows with every death. And in a world that produces death in industrial quantities, it is winning.
Not a single body but a presence — an intelligence that manifests through the dead, through the spaces between the living, through the cold places where Builder technology has torn holes in reality. When given form, it is ancient, patient, and fundamentally opposed to the continuation of life. It wears the dead like clothing.
Also known as: The King of the Dead