Killing the King

I bowed my head and looked away from the massacre, only to look at my father on my right, smiling as if he were looking at a field of flowers on a warm day.

But it wasn't a field of flowers. It was a field of bodies; moving and unmoving, the moving tripping on the still until they joined them. If you looked objectively it would be quite entertaining. A game, nothing more, relying on your ability to dance among limbs that existed only to trip you.

I guess my father was looking objectively, trying to see the humour in the slaughter. He would stand on his balcony with his family and watch the world burn if it meant he could somehow get a good laugh. Father never seemed to laugh these days unless he had intestines and blood seeping into the floor.

Today must have been a party like no other.

Honestly, I was jealous of him, of his ability to lose himself inside of himself. To abandon all remnants of conscious and laugh at the dead and dying. I should have laughed too, just for practice. If I was going to rile too, I had to look the part.

My father had once told me a story when I was little, entirely under the pretenses of manipulating me. He told it like this:

In a distant kingdom ruled by a cruel prince, war was brewing. All the people of the land loved him and all the aristocrats wanted his head on a platter.

The people of the kingdom, hearing of the aristocrats' "betrayal" to the pronce, formed an army and rode for justice against their foes.

The battle lasted for three hours and in that time every rebellious solder was slain, every woman slaughtered, and every child executed. The kingdom rejoiced.

My father would end the story with some famous quote telling of the people's weakness and contempt for authority and their inability to pick a ruler.

Most every night he would tell me this story. He would read it out of a twenty-pound storybook that lay on top of my bookcase everyday, waiting for my father to read it. He ensured I would never read it without him to do the honours for me.

One day, when I was much too old for books of magic and princes, I decided to look at the story of my childhood.

With a loud thump and a cloud of dust, I pulled it down from the shelf. That day I read through the entire book over and over again and never found the story I was read. It was then I knew he lied to me.

I recalled upon that memory as the fighting raged on. I felt the cold, hard steel of my sword resting on my hip. It was nice to still be feeling something even when I knew what was to happen.

"You will make and excellent ruler, child," he told me, his eloquent but gravelly voice told me. It was almost a compliment, but sounded nearly enough like condescension in the way he addressed me.

I drew my sword from its sheath. He didn't hear, I almost wished he heard. "I plan to be, Father," I answered, and thrust my sword so far into him its hilt touched his stomach and a single tear fell onto his armoured, dead shoulder.