Onyx Rose awakened first.

She wasn't sure what was going on, but there seemed to be an awful lot of noise coming from the town. Which was odd, because everyone in the town was supposedly dead.

Arien, who seemed to have morphed overnight into a burlier and more rugged man, had his head pillowed on one of the werewolves, who slept in wolf form. Another one was curled up next to his feet making cute little dream noises and rapidly twitching its paws. She wondered for a moment if werewolves dreamt differently in wolf form than in human form, or if they dreamt of chasing rabbits regardless of their shape.

Gerald seemed to have disappeared under his cloak, which she had a feeling was more than it appeared (it was), and the architects were spooning in a line. Her mother and the others who appeared with her slept in odd positions, which is what comes of being trapped in a tiny space with too many other people for centuries.

The noise which woke her came again and she set of toward the town, letting the rest of the group sleep.

As she drew near the town she realized the sound was actually a chorus of calls for help, followed by someone shouting.

"Help!" Multiple voices called together.

"Help is anyone there?"

"Can someone help us please?"

"NO, NO, STOP! We're never going to get help this way. We need a uniform call for help all at once. Meredith this isn't time to assert your individuality, join with the group please! Now on three, one..."

"Help!" A call interrupted the count.

"DAMMIT, LAURA!"

"Sorry, I got carried away."

"Don't apologize to him Laura, he doesn't have any authority over us anymore."

"SHUT UP, MEREDITH! You're out of the cult.  Now on three, one, two, three..."

"HEEELLLLP!"

Onyx Rose knew the voice yelling at people to do what he said. She turned the last corner and entered the square. Everyone who had previously been dead seemed to have magically* come back to life, and were now in an extremely unpleasant situation.

"Hello, Oren," Onyx Rose said, cocking her head.  "I see some good things aren't meant to last."

"Rose!  My dear, so good to see you.  Do you think you could help get us down from here?"

"Yes, help us!" Someone called.

"We promise we won't try to kill you again."

"WITCH!" The baker yelled, "It's the WITCH!"

Everyone else turned to stare at him.  Antagonizing the one person who could get them down was an extremely poor idea.

Onyx Rose turned around and walked away from the pitiful calls for her help.  Assuming she was just going to leave them there, which would have been completely justifiable, several people began to weep pitifully. In reality, she was going to get help, because she had no intention of doing all the work by her self.

About twenty minutes later Onyx Rose reappeared, this time with the others in her group, and they set about releasing most people from their scarecrow-like state, and introducing them to the new King.  Some, however, they decided weren't worth the effort. Oren was one of these. The baker was another. They decided to leave them to Fate, if she ever got around to reappearing.

Even the baker's wife, who had actually been doing ninety percent of the work in the business for years, was fine with leaving him there. 

"Gladice please!" He begged. 

"No, Norman, I'm not going to help you this time.  Remember what you said to me when I fell down the stairs?  If I could get myself into a situation like that, I needed to learn to get myself out of it.  'Self-reliance is the key to success.' Well, you'll just have to get yourself out of this situation. 
"I thought a lot while I was dead, and now that I've been given a second chance at life I'm not going to squander it away on the likes of you." She set her shoulders, lifted her head, and walked away to the congratulatory sounds of her neighbors and friends who spoke as if he was already dead.

"Good for you, Gladice."

"...never liked Norman..."

"He always gave me the smallest loaf..."

"...never a smile to me in twenty years, not since I complained about those cookies he baked..."

"Did you know he made a pass at me? Well it was before he met you, but still."

"Those were some really bad cookies, that's why Gladice took over, he was running that bakery into the ground."

"...always grumbling about my business marketing..."

"Glad you're moving on so well."

"I'm right here!" The Baker's protests went ignored.

Arien was having a swell time introducing himself as King. The Wizard had set off back home to get Arien's crown, which he insisted he knew the exact placement of in his hall of "controlled chaos," and would bring it back for the coronation ceremony. 

The architects were already discussing rebuilding the castle with the help of the Mage Society Board of Directors, who were discussing the appropriate placement of their new headquarters, while they helped people off the crosses. This took longer than necessary because they kept getting into arguments over the best masons to hire and which contractors would try to swindle the King out of more money through unnecessary change orders or bait and switch material substitutions (Hint - all of them).

Once they got her down, Arien's mother was overjoyed to see him.  This was mostly because she'd found out that he was King, which meant she could be something like a duchess if she played her cards right.

She kept saying things like, "I knew he couldn't be so beautiful for nothing." And, "Destined for greatness, that's what I've always said." (She hadn't)

He was conflicted about this since he had always desired his mother's love but got the feeling, like so many lottery winners, that her affection was only in proportion to the size of his wallet. While he was growing more kingly by the hour, he was still completely broke, and was of a conflicted mind whether or not to tell her this.

In contrast, Onyx Rose seemed to be getting wealthier by the moment.  Someone had leaked that she was the lost heir to the Dingleburg fortune and she found herself instantly surrounded with estate lawyers, who assumed she would need their help, journalists, who assumed she would give an interview, documentary filmmakers, who assumed she would want a movie made about her, and developers the architects were already in conversation with, who assumed nothing but were asking about leasing her land to rebuild the castle.  She was beginning to regret helping anyone at all.

Arien, who was becoming concerned at his ability to run a kingdom with no prior experience, and no royal treasury, made a split-second, and poorly thought out, decision to then and there propose marriage to Onyx Rose.  This was broadcast across the Kingdom to an enraptured audience, which was growing by the millisecond the way all good fads do. 

The news anchors somehow had dug up alarmingly correct information in a scant amount of time (usually this is in reverse) and already they were telling viewers how Arien was the last of a royal lineage which stretched back to the Old Kings, and had received his enchanted sword in a magical ceremony which reconstituted the monarchy's divine mandate to rule the kingdom.

The beautiful (this is debatable) woman who their new King was proposing to was the birth daughter of the last queen, who magically reappeared the evening before, and the adopted daughter of the Dingleburg's, and the lot heir to the Dingleburg fortune.  She owned about a third of the Kingdom, was incredibly rich, and was also the childhood friend of the King, which made everyone swoon at how adorable they were as a couple. 

Their upbringing in cults was quickly glossed over, especially since Arien had found his pants again, and together with his now very broad shoulders his outfit actually looked much like a tunic and leggings, and he was somehow pulling the look off. Clothing designers everywhere were already drawing up new lines of fashion based off of the sheet-dress and rope cord look, and were declaring it the hottest look of the season. 

Onyx Rose, completely caught off guard by Arien grabbing her hand and blurring out something which was supposed to be, "Will you marry me?" but actually sounded something like "Murder me?" Backhanded him in surprise.  Her reaction probably would have been the same if she hadn't be surprised, but this way she had an excuse. 

Surrounded by exponentially multiplying cameras and microphones, and the flashing of cameras, she had zero idea what she was supposed to do, and so did the only thing she was used to and told the truth. 

"Why would I want to marry you?"

Arien blushed with embarrassment, "Because I'm the King?" He squeaked.

Onyx Rose stood there looking down at the boy, now man, who was trying very hard to grab one of her hands, while she kept slapping his away, and tried to understand what she was feeling.  Her silence was growing uncomfortable for everyone across the whole kingdom.  People everywhere were on the edge of their seats, shouting at TVs for her to "say yes!"

"No," she said.  Gasps echoed across the kingdom, and instantly a good half of the female population, and an eight of the male population felt intense hatred toward her.

"Why not?" He cried - this was becoming quite a scandal and he hadn't even been King for a day.

"Because you're not asking for the right reasons," she said, putting her hands on her hips.  "You only want me for my money.  Also, we've known each other for a week."

"And one afternoon," he interjected.

"And one afternoon," she agreed.  "But that's not nearly enough time to form an opinion of someone's character, and that whole time we've been a little preoccupied with trying to save the world."

News Anchors everywhere launched into a strangely detailed account of the last week of their lives, and how there had nearly been an apocalypse, but they'd averted it at the last minute.  There was no mention of the fact that it was actually Onyx Rose, and her father, who were responsible for it nearly happening in the first place, because that would have made them liable for slander - especially now that her father was gone and they had no proof that she was the daughter of the Dark Lord, or the existence of the Dark Lord in the first place. 

"Look," said Onyx Rose, "You're going to have to figure out running a kingdom, and there are still a lot of murderous salespeople out there who need rounding up, not to mention those shaving products are still dangerous and need to be found and destroyed.  I know nothing about kingdoms, but someone mentioned you'll need a champion to go out and deal with stuff and kill the people who need killing.  That's kind of my specialty really, so why not save us all a lot of trouble and just ask me to be your champion instead of your wife?"

This all made a lot of sense, and the previous 5/16ths of the Kingdom's population who were feeling intense hatred toward Onyx Rose, now felt she was on to something. Just as they were about to agree, a thought nibbled at her mind that being Queen would essentially mean she would be at the top of what amounted to the largest pyramid scheme ever - theocracy coming in a close second.  At the last minute she suggested she would be open to dating, and Arien was relieved to not be completely romantically rejected.

***

The coronation took place a year later when the new castle was complete, and because it took about that long for the Wizard to actually come up with the crown.  People whispered that there had been slave labor or illegal immigrants used in the rebuilding, but in reality, the Wizard, Gerald, and The Mage Society Board of Directors - who had allowed Gerald to retake his tests and finally achieve the status of Mage - sped up the construction process the traditional way - with magic. 

Onyx Rose decided to gift him almost all of her land as a coronation present, because she didn't want to deal with developers.  She did keep a small slice on the very edge of the Kingdom, adjacent to the Aryan Elves. It was quiet and out of the way and included gold mines for independent income.

The coronation would have been a complete success, but unfortunately someone had decided a seafood buffet was a good idea.  The Kingdom was landlocked, however, and shellfish never does well in transit for an extended period of time, nor out in the open air of a buffet table, and everyone who ate the shrimp became violently ill. 

Thankfully, Arien was not one of them because he was allergic to shrimp.  Onyx Rose wasn't either, because she refused to eat anything that carried its home on its back.  The werewolves, who had been reinstated as the royal guard, didn't eat seafood, but Gerald (who was the person secretly responsible for suggesting the seafood buffet) loved shrimp, and could be heard moaning, "I've made a huge mistake," from his spot on the bathroom floor.

The whole fiasco was hushed up faster than a boy in math class, and everyone fondly remembered the coronation as the most fun the Kingdom had had in years. 

Onyx Rose spent her time running around the Kingdom cleaning up her father's messes, threatening Oligarchs, rescuing witches and warlocks from ignorant murderous villagers, and significantly reducing the number of cults and pyramid schemes, despite her desire to create one of her own.  She found her job as champion extremely enjoyable, and never once regretted her decision to save the world. 

Unfortunately, Fate, who had been the one feeding the incredibly detailed and accurate information to the news anchors, wasn't quite done with her yet.  And so it was two years into King Arien's reign that Onyx Rose, Gerald, and Arien, found themselves staring into the dark depths of a wormhole which had decided to disguise itself as a benign piece of furniture.**  In the distance Fate sped off in her red Ferrari, on her way to check out a warm beach Destiny had heartily recommended.

- The End -

*
This was actually due to a slight malfunction in the time-bubble which Lorred D'Kay was put into, and which was slowly reversing everything he'd done before he was sucked into the ring.  This would eventually provide just cause for a sequel.

**
A wardrobe to be precise.