Tales of Hours Since Passed

Her Fall

The empire I preside over is a great insatiable beast of need and want. Every citizen has a desire, those desires legion, forming the heads of a grand hydra. Every request fulfilled by the hands of the crown only making the people demand more, and the governors I try to put in place to divide these requests between us only multiply the expectations further, two heads where once sat one. I had a beautiful wife once, and this monstrous thing I now serve took her from me when its heads and demands became too many to appease. A wild fey, a being far older than I, an ethereal beauty tied more strongly to magic and to nature than I could imagine, and a beauty which should've lasted a thousand years more. I tire of caring for that which killed her, and I am tempted to treat it as the overgrown abomination it is. I once heard that the only way to keep a beheaded hydra down is to burn the stumps, and a part of me wonders at the prospect of burning this land to the ground so that I may be done with it.

I once bore the symbols of the rule which, once privilege, has become my burden. The crown, once a shining and gorgeous adornment of gold and the rarest gems of the land, rested heavy on my head, the materials of luxury a weight pressing down upon my shoulders, and as a less important burden than that which it stood for, so it has been left unused and unattended, now tarnished and dusty, home to little else but spiders, the sort of despicable and cunning little things who stave off their starvation by devouring what they deem lesser, and the simplest choice would be to step away and allow this nation to follow the same path unguided. Why not, after all, if the rebellion which my soldiers try to hide me from has left me without her who gave me guidance?

The throne lies empty yet not the vast courtroom, servants tending to it, preventing those who come to seek me out from finding it in disarray even in my absence for a time. Peasants keep the paintings' frames from falling crooked, they polish and shine the empty suits of armor and weapons they hold aloft along the carpeted walk to the throne cushioned in red but magically sculpted from the same marble monolith which made perfect and shining pillars behind each false knight and the curving staircases on either side of the room. The lowliest in the castle even keep white the somehow pristine vaulted ceiling I cannot imagine how one could reach, yet heads of state cannot be relied upon for the same dedication, nobility and kingdom royalty taking up the empire in my absence is improbable so long as I am expected to return. Once I thought those who had proven themselves loyal to the nation would prove also loyal to the one who ruled over it, but now I realize they simply don't have as much to gain by rebelling, and far more to lose. They don't bear any true allegiance to me, they've judged their latest rulers, late and living, just as the people did, condemning us for being seen as too different except in the ways we were deemed too alike, one ruler of the empire not even human.

The long ago once-jeweled scepter which once would lie in my hand now lies upon the same table as my writings, broken under its own weight with time, more useless as an ornament even than it once was, the symbol of a ruler hidden away from view so that others may not see it in its disgrace and weakness, so that others may not ridicule or lose faith. Pointless, really. The people once had faith, but when my wife and I were wed, the ceremony became the first of many venues where the people cried out in realizing there'd be no heir, the catalyst for a long-brewing revolt I should've noticed lurking in the shadows sooner. 

The carefully crafted ring upon my hand rusts, the runic design of raven and wolf which adorned the steel now nearly eaten away by alliances formed and promises made with each shake of the hand that wears it, decaying ever more with time and ever faster with every new responsibility taken on. I covered my eyes with this hand when I lost her to a city I knew she would never have been in were it not for me, my tears truly setting that decay to faster motion, the symbols of a leader of the pack and a follower of death eaten away most by my worst responsibility, a wild fey empress to bury in the capital of a thrice-born country, a wife which that nation condemned me for and who no one else would give such a dignity, a casualty I could not distance myself from as just a number like so many others I have.