A Story of Two Kingdoms

Even on his deathbed, my father looked more lively than me.

That’s always how it’s been. People have often said that I don’t resemble him at all. Worryingly, they even doubt that I really am his son. They know right away that I’m my mother’s son though. A woman whose body was too weak for childbirth, who couldn’t help but fall terribly ill for years after my birth. Even if they didn’t say it, I can feel it in the way they look at me, like they’re just waiting for me to die. They don’t think of me as anything more than an obstacle on their road to power. All that even though I’m their king.

I’m sitting on my father’s throne still; I haven’t been king a single day. And I hardly know how to sit here. I’ve inherited my father’s war, and I’m hardly the military man he was. I don’t know how to wage a war, especially not one we never should have fought. In a fit of madness, my father had invaded our neighbor, the Kingdom of Vyn, several months ago. He could take to the battlefield himself, but he had already lost his capacity to lead an army properly. All he could earn us was a single enemy general and a new king.

He’s left me a situation I don’t know how to resolve. I don’t have the right air of authority to resolve it. That’s always been my problem, ever since I was a child. I’ve never been able to follow through, even when I know the right answer. I’m hardly able to make my presence known, much less command others, even though I’ve been raised as a prince for the past eighteen years. That’s why I can’t work with my ministers who plot against me. And that’s why I wasn’t able to stop them from using my father’s madness for their own pathetic ends.

I don’t know how my father could fight a war with rot like that so nearby.

“Your Majesty, we’re now prepared to bring the captured general before you, if it pleases you.”

“Very well, bring them.”

Even if I can’t do much, I imagine I can at least handle a single general. This will have to be my first step in ending this losing war. And in many ways, they’re the reason we’re losing it. The general my father had captured, the general who killed my father, was a complete unknown. They simply appeared in the Kingdom of Vyn as far as we can tell, and they first fought on the battlefields my father made. Even their name isn’t known. In spite of all that, they’re so very like my father. A singular force capable of turning the tides of a battlefield on their own. Somebody so very unlike me.

But they’re only human, like anyone else. Even if they can kill hundreds of our men alone, as long as it’s not a fight, I truly believe I can handle it.

The large doors to the throne room open up. One of my father’s knights walks in first, ahead of the captured general.

“You now stand before His Majesty Alfred III!”

Following that announcement, the prisoner enters the throne room. However, they weren’t at all what I expected. When I heard they were the one who had killed my father, I expected them to be some kind of giant man, the same kind as him. I couldn’t imagine anything else being able to do it. But the one that walks in is a beautiful, slender-armed girl. She doesn’t seem like she should have the power to kill a man like my father at all. Perhaps it’s because she has no weapons and her arms are bound, but she really doesn’t seem like she’d even be able to kill somebody. She doesn’t have the air of a warrior about her.

And she really is a beautiful girl. She has long brown hair and soft, round amber eyes. She’s been stripped of her armor and left in a pitch black bodysuit hugging her large chest. It’s despicable what my soldiers and ministers do. They should have gotten her dressed more properly, but they’re too addicted to their own superiority to do anything less than this. But even with their attempt to humiliate her, she seems unfazed. She simply stares at me, sitting in my father’s throne, and in her gaze I suppose there is the fierceness of a warrior. Even now she’s fighting. Truly, she is a beautiful girl.

“Your Majesty, if I may make a suggestion,” one of my ministers whispers to me, looking down at her, “we ought to execute this girl and display her body. It’ll demoralize Vyn and we’ll be able to press on and take our revenge.”

He’s a shifty, sleazy man. It’s like he’s forgotten that we’re the ones who attacked them unprovoked, Or rather, that he’s forgotten that he’s one of the ones who goaded an old man whose mind was slipping to attack them.

I’m not executing her. I wasn’t going to in the first place. I was planning to imprison the general and talk to them, and send them back to Vyn to broker peace. If it was just that then I could do it. I thought I could do it even if I hated my father’s killer.

“There will be no execution.” I declare that to my court of ministers as I stand from the throne.

They all erupt in their own shouts, some staunchly fighting to execute her, some seizing the opportunity to take charge of her themselves. But all of them call for something horrible to be done to her. If it were just the killer of my father, I’m not confident I could find the will to protect her.

But I know this girl. She’s somebody I won’t hurt.

“I’ll take charge of her imprisonment and her treatment myself. That is my will as your king.”

That silences them. All of them fall silent at the sound of my voice. Even though I’m the sort of hazy man who can’t assert himself, even though I’m a failure of a royal who can hardly bear the weight of the crown, they all obeyed.

I walk up to that general, that girl I ought to have cherished.

These are the circumstances behind our fated meeting. This is how this story begins. It isn't a story of war or nations, nor of kings or generals. This is our story. This is just our story. The story between me and that girl. The story between me and my childhood friend who has changed so much since I last saw her.