The Last Monarch

Rls has no kings. Not anymore. The last monarch was no bloated leech, no decadent reveler like his predecessors. Nor was he a fool, an inbred wretch who earned the throne only by being born in a castle rather than a barnyard. Instead, he was a noose. Not a constrictor, because a constrictor tries to crush prey, to eat, to act. It has, on some level, an awareness of what it does. No-one would ever know if this king did. He never emerged from his palace to embrace the usual trappings of royalty. He was even less than a face, little more than a name on a page and a blank stamp.

His crimes started slow at first. A small cut to the budget here, an erosion to the workers’ protections there. Little by little, the rope tightened. It took so long to be noticed, and on the few times it was questioned, the prior deficits and newly balanced books shrugged off queries like arrows off the hide of a dragon. This was accepted-the eldest among the people remembered past crises, of constant debt, of broken walls, soldiers trying to fend off invaders with rusted armour. Those too young to remember had heard the tales too, by firesides and over dinner tables.

The first real strife came with the famine. Blight had spread across the nation like wildfire, filling grains with sickly pus. As it set in, the people did not fear, for as their King had told them this was a wealthy nation, and they knew their neighbours had been untouched by the sickness. The price might rise slightly, but things would be fine. It kept creeping up, however. The poorest demanded action, the starving farmers and workers. Those above them spread reassurance, comforting platitudes and promises they had no sway over. Still the prices rose, and discontent spread. A delegation went to the King, demanding he provide aid. They were met first with silence, then with scholars.To buy aid from abroad, they were told, would unbalance the books. Did they wish to return to the last crisis, when debts tore down families and banks burned? Or worse, did they wish ill on this nation, the constant threat of owed favour a sword above their head? They were to trust their king. These answers quieted the discontent among some, but the starving few pleaded. At least, those of them still strong enough to stand did. The jeers of their onetime allies and the flash of steel from the castle broke their spirit, but not their need. Many of the dead got no graves that winter, the survivors having no strength to dig and better uses for the bodies.

After that, the questions became more vocal, for a time. Slowly, they became aggressive. Blame was nudged towards the king ever so tentatively. He brushed it away with a pitiful monument and a short speech, emphasising the ever growing treasuries and tremendous gains that had been made in undoing the damages of the famine to the nation’s accounts. For some, this was enough, and the loss of momentum and allies let apathy fester in the others. Nothing changed, of course. That would risk the books. At least, nothing changed on the surface. Below, the noose kept tightening, and yet more people slipped from the ladder to find it tighten around their neck.

Slowly, the ghosts of the starved coalesced, shared rage bringing purpose to their souls. Under the cover of many nights, they organised, moving in a wave towards the palace. What they found within was completely unlike what they expected. While laden with the trappings of wealth, it was hardly the falsified orgy of decadence that they presumed. The vaults were really laden with wealth, the exports flourishing, all the King had promised. And yet that was all they found. Scouring the building for every scrap of information they could find, there was not a single mention of the outside, not practically. Nothing more than a web of increasingly meaningless numbers. No mentions of the starved dead, the growing clampur outside, the lone hermits who travelled from place to place, the last remnants of villages choked by the shifting morass of figures, those that hosted enterprises the numbers disliked. In their growing anger, an agreement formed. It was not enough to see the king gone. He had to suffer. To have his every sin forced down his throat until his armor of ignorance shattered.

At first, the king could barely hear the whispers. Even as they grew in volume, discrete words were impossible to make out. At least, until he tried to sleep. When he did, the constant clamphr shifted, going from a woven fabric of voices to a single thread, each whispered story a stitch in the tapestry of his crimes.

“We were promised better here. Streets paved with gold. A worthy ruler, not some silent statue”

“My baby died IN MY ARMS”

“I ate my sister as she fell forgive me please I couldn’t help myself I hadn’t eaten in weeks forgive me”

“Did you see our dead? Did you even know who you were mourning, with that monument?*

After the third night, he took a sleeping pill from his personal apothecary. (He didn’t mention the voices. That would have meant he was like the others. He wasn’t. He knew he was better than them) Within hours, the voices had adapted, the stream of begging, pleading, screaming, dead now a constant flow of whispers in his ears. It was all the worse for its subtlety. No screaming, no outward sign. He could almost blot it out for a moment, until his focus broke and they returned. He had no care for their pleas. Did they not see the flowing treasury? The vaults stuffed to bursting? The finally banished deficit? The nation was richer than it had ever been, and this is how he was repaid? No, clearly this was some foreign plot, the work of a jealous rival.

Paranoia festered in his restless mind, and soon he began to refuse the sleeping pills and offered help. For longer and longer, he toiled at laws and numbers, hunched over abacuses and accounts, trying to banish the sounds in work. Every error was not some fault of exhaustion, but the plot of an unseen enemy, making him question his very sanity. The constant barrage of voices bought him a great benefit-it ensured he never slept, and so no assassins could close in to finish the job. His labours dragged longer and longer, diving ever deeper into the sea of digits that swam across the pages, resolving into impossible sigils. His rotted mind snapped, and he took up arms with the first thing to hand, ready to guard his vaults from a threat that was to strike in only moments. Upon arrival, he fell into the icy gold in a lover’s embrace, and began a vigilant guard duty, pacing back and forth even as his body demanded respite. However, this assault and his upbringing had taught him nothing if not discipline, and he ignored the growing sense of dehydration even as his body began to fail. It was finally found weeks later by a curious guard, huddled in a corner exactly opposite the entrance, shrivelled and decayed, still standing sentinel against an imagined threat.