The King's Dispatcher

Name: The King's Dispatcher
Author: David Farland

expanded novella 2016 The Runelords

Record

First published	2016
Original language	EN
Work type	novella
Canon status	expanded
First-edition date	2016-11-21
First-edition publisher	Grim Oak Press

Synopsis

Billed as the third prequel novella set in David Farland's Runelords world, this short work is set before the events of the main series in a kingdom whose rulers can magically transfer physical and mental attributes, such as strength, wit, or stamina, between subjects and lords.

Where it sits

Universe: The Runelords
Series: The Runelords: Prequels expanded; position 3 of 4 in the series' recorded order
Author: David Farland

Notes

Publication year corroborated 2026-09-16: first appeared as "The King's Despatcher" in the anthology *Unfettered II: New Tales by Masters of Fantasy* (ed. Shawn Speakman, Grim Oak Press), published 2016-11-21 -- confirmed via that anthology's own table of contents. The standalone ebook (this record's own title spelling, "The King's Dispatcher") is a later separate edition of the same story.
From the series record (The Runelords: Prequels): Four short prequels, explicitly numbered and marketed as prequels by the author's own site, exploring earlier history in the Runelords setting outside the main numbered sequence. Exact individual publication years were not confidently pinned down in this admission's research and are left unrecorded rather than guessed.

Neighbouring works

Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.

Publication order, within the series The Runelords: Prequels: position 3 of 4: previous Ashes and Starlight: A Runelords Story (2014) · next Woven of Shadow

Sources

← The Runelords dossier · All universes

Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.