Tale of the Week 299: The Emperor and the Child - VOTE!
The Emperor and the Child
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Submission 1 Twenty years it had been since the conquest of his tribe, the day Arik had been adopted by his enemy. Unlike the others, the southerners had taken pity on him, practically a babe crying over the corpses of his mother and father.
Every night Arik would again be visited by the memory of that day. He remembered how the massive man adorned in shining gold leapt from his pale steed and offered his hand in friendship, all while his soldiers continued the slaughter. A circle of men just as imposing and adorned in bright purple cloaks flanked Arik as the man approached. He stood supreme above them all. The Emperor.
From that day forward, the Emperor had taken in Arik as one of his own, a savage boy from the north being fostered in the ways of civilized man. He had been given a good life, the tools to read and write, training in the ways of war from his tutors, foods and wines from all across the Shattered Sea and it’s city-states that the Empire had achieved hegemony over.
Yet, the palace was not his home; Arik never truly felt like a southerner. From the first day he had set foot within its walls he heard the whispers of even the palace’s servants; which slowly gave way to insults as he began to understand the airy, descriptive language that so differed from the one he had heard all of his life. He was seen by many as less than the bastards prior emperors had allowed to live within the palace, while others only used him as evidence their plans for further conquests could civilize the barbarians.
The Emperor himself had never uttered interest in such plans in Arik’s presence. Over the recent years that tall, shining figure covered in the tools of war had given way to a more kindly figure. His salted brown stubble had become a flowing white beard while his muscular frame had shrunken considerably into a hunched, gaunt shape. Despite the circumstances of how they met, he had always been good to Arik, his adopted son.
Yet for all the Emperor’s generosity and for all the gifts he been given over the years, the screams of the women that day in Vesterfield still filled Arik’s skull every moment he still drew breath. The man who had styled himself a father had only been so after killing Arik’s true father. The Emperor, like his sons and heirs before him, deserved to die an unnatural death.
Like every night of the past year, Arik poisoned the Emperor’s chalice with the vials he had first stolen so long ago. He knew there were those who would suspect him when the old man finally died, but he cared little for how his story would end. That man, once so strong and a harbinger of destruction, for all his efforts to absolve himself, would leave a new legacy as the man whose death dismantled an Empire.
Submission 2 Dmitri Sokolov, Supreme leader of the Hegemony of Man, stands on his office balcony in the Imperial Palace on New Terra, looking down at the vast expanse of city beneath him – land conquered millennia ago by his ancestors. The din of city life rises up to meet the subdued silence of the Imperial Palace. Dmitri looks down at the child in his arms, swaddled tightly against the cold and wind.
The child, his son’s bastard, looks up blinking and cooing softly – its breath leaving little puffs of condensation in the cold winter air. Dmitri’s eldest son had come to him earlier that day, begging for permission to adopt the bastard. Now, hours later, he stands alone with his son’s bastard; the symbol of his poisoned legacy held tightly in his arms, and considers the child’s fate.
The Imperial Line, unbroken and pure for generations had now been sullied by the misdeeds of his own son, his own heir. No, not his son anymore. He would have to start anew, with a new heir. Dmitri looks down from the balcony at the city hundreds of meters below, taking in the bright lights and sounds – and then drops the child over the balcony, watching it quickly disappear into the phantasmagoria of lights below. He turns away from the balcony and steps back into his office.
Dmitri sits down at his desk and leans back in his chair before keying on the intercom and saying, “Natasha, tell my son I’m ready to see him now”.
Submission 3 The walls, before sheets of white marble, were scorched with soot and ash, long seeping trails of crimson running down from their crests. The streets, before smoothest brick, bright and warm, were scuffed with muddy bootprints, weighted with corpses and the oozing runoff of death. The air, before crisp and clean, ringing with song and the hawkers’ cries, was now choked with smoke and rent by a thousand thousand death rattles and the keening wails of a thousand thousand weeping widows and orphans. But there at the top, in the mountain of polished stone that was the Supreme Oracle’s retreat, there was a sense of calm.
Standing there in the gentle breezes, above the pain and blood and shrieks of the city below, an aging man wearing a winged crown looked out over the smoldering city, the last conquest of his long reign. His mismatched eyes, one green and one blue, raked back and forth over the ruins, taking in his legacy. And then a single tear gathered at the corner of his green right eye.
Reaching up, he wiped the drop of moisture away, and then stretched his arm over to rest on the shoulder of the younger man standing beside him. With his other hand, he gestured toward the city, toward the fires and screams.
“I adopted you out of this, Faris,” the man began, halting as a racking cough tore its way through his chest.
“I know, father,” Faris answered.
As the man finally regained himself, steadying his breathing, he fixed Faris with a cold look. “Yes, you know, boy. But you know I will say it anyway then, yes?”
Faris’ eyes narrowed for the merest fraction of a moment, and then he nodded.
“Good. Now, at the end, it is right to do things properly.” The man nodded to himself, as though he had convinced himself of some necessary truth. “Twenty years ago, I killed my sons and daughters. They were good children, but their ideas were poisoned by a woman who never could bring herself to see the hard truths. Foolish wife. I killed them, and I took you from this place, took your raggedy orphan self and made you my own. Why did I do that?”
“To continue the work,” Faris answered flatly.
“Yes! To continue the work! This was the last city. And that means we have done what no king or emperor has ever done before; we have made peace. I am dying, but when I go there will be only you. No brother to tear at your empire. No remaining lineages to challenge your claim. Only you, and there will be eternal peace.”
Faris looked out on the burning city, and then on his adoptive father. The man was old, frail. Faris made a choice and three seconds later there was a wet crunch on the smooth bright bricks below.
“Long live Faris,” the emperor said under his breath, staring down on the winged crown skipping its way down the street.
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