English Story

The good king watched the man who he had so recently sentenced to his death…or his marriage. To be honest, he had just put a man in his arena with a nymph and a beast. The man would choose his own destiny, not the king. And no one could possibly argue the validity of this compromise. His people loved him for his genius, and they got a good show. They would either get a royal and august wedding, or a man being mauled to death by a large cat. Everyone won in this situation, there was no argument to be made. And if someone did make an argument, he would put them in the arena. Brilliance was abundant in this kingdom.
The boy was about to make his decision. The crowd loved this, and there was only a moment until the boy’s fate was decided by his own self. The door opened. The king took a moment to admire his door. Huge, wooden, classic, yet not an antique. It was mighty, like his dynasty. And as it opened it groaned it such a way that made it seem as though it new what a weighty fate it was letting loose. It seemed to realize whose life was in its control. And then the moment came.
The door opened. Nothing appeared for a minute. This had never happened before. Normally a gorgeous women or a tiger emerged without hesitation. But here nothing was behind the door, just shadows. No, that shadow was moving. Slowly; it had to assess the situation before it could make its attack. But only the king realized that the boy was doomed, because he was the only one to see the tiger. But in just a moment everyone would know that the boy was dead, the princess was unwed, and the king was almighty.
Just when the king thought that perhaps the tiger was too frightened by the massive amount of people in the stadium, he pounced out intro the open. The deafening crowd suddenly became perfectly silent, making not a sound. The beast’s eyes had a look in them that the king had never seen in any creature. It was not terror, nor was it domination. It was sorrow, pure, uncontained, unbridled sorrow. The king wondered for a moment if the tiger could feel, if it was sorry for what it was about to do. But that was impossible; the beast was merely a beast with no mind. He waived the matter away and put a mask of certainty and control. He knew that in a few minutes all would be as he wanted it. He was of course the king; didn’t he deserve to be happy?
The tiger was truly sorry, not for the fact that it was going to make a kill, but for what she knew would happen. She was a tiger and thus had little reasoning ability, but her intuition was far more capable than a human’s. She felt his own end coming, but could not discern the source of the killer. Nothing scared her more than uncertainty.
The Lady behind the other door heard the tiger emerge, and new that the boy was destined for death. She felt sorry for him; he was young and comely, tall and strong. He was smart and acted it, save for loving a princess. The Lady had actually had some affection for the courtier, but it wasn’t worth much now. She felt a small tear come to her eyes, and knew the crowd must be terribly sorry to see such a youth be charged with such a fate. She had not loved the courtier, but she had often wished he saw her to be as beautiful as the princess. Or whatever he loved her for. She thought it odd when they were together, for he had oft times been with his lover when the king was out. They seemed to fit together and he saw her soul instead of her skin. It baffled her and made her jealous, but she wasn’t as hot-blooded as her lady, so she never really acted upon it. Her interactions with the courtier save for the minor seductions she played with. But all the court ladies attempted in a half-hearted way to woo him and make him theirs. It never had any effect because of his absolute desire towards the princess. The entire court had in fact been rather depressed at the king’s decision to charge him with a crime, but all that had cleared up when she had been chosen as the lady to wait behind the door. Everyone agreed it would be a near-cryptic experience, and completely terrifying is the man chose the wrong door. She had worried about it for some time, the decision meant a lot to her, so she could only imagine what the princess was going through.
The princess was going through far worse than the small-minded lady-in-waiting could encompass. She knew which fate lied behind each door, but which to tell him? She had seen in flirting with other girls…or at least had imagined it. Such things sent her blood in a berserk. How could he? Was she not enough? But if he died, how could she continue living with such guilt? Was she justified in sending him to the tiger? Was he justified in enjoying life with any woman besides herself?
The king watched the tiger destroy the boy. His corpse was mauled, shredded, and ruined. It was not the tiger’s fault. The boy had attempted to struggle, which resulted in the tiger being forced to cause him harm instead of just killing him. It was bloody, but the barbaric king took a small pleasure in seeing such might. Tigers were among his favorite of creatures. They were resourceful, strong, daring, stealthy, and absolutely deadly. He loved it. The gleam in their eye right before they made a kill was hypnotizing a barbaric man such as the king. No, he was semi-barbaric, for no mere barbarian could have dreamt up such a clever idea as the arena. But what unfolded next was far too much for even a complete barbarian.
The princess had pointed to the door concealing the tiger for the simply purpose of killing her lover so that he could not enjoy the love of another woman. But she realized after seeing him mutilated that she had made a choice that defied description. She had murdered her lover! She was the one who had told him to choose the tiger. She had destroyed the one person who she had ever loved.
Unforgivable, hat was the first word that appeared. What she had done could never be forgiven. She could not live life any longer. She had contaminated her father’s judicial system and in the process had horrified the townspeople. There was nothing positive about this situation. She was in a vacuum that had taken away everything positive. Nothing but fear remained. Fear and Sorrow. Sorrow and Pain. She knew that only one course could be taken, and it was her only escape route from the vacuum. She hurled herself into the arena to confront her lover’s killer.
The king looked on with a dread sprouting from the greatest depths of his being. He had never felt as he did right now. His only daughter had just killed herself by jumping into his own arena. It was never meant to be like this, the arena was never meant to be personal. It was just something he did to find justice in the most cultured way possible. But now it had taken his daughter and given her to the jaws of a viscous hunter that would not even think about killing such a beautiful girl. It was unfeeling, unthinking, untamed. He hated the tiger. It was stealing from him all that he cared for, and it must pay. He bellowed a command out to his guards, commanding the immediate execution of the tiger. He jumped over the barrier and ran in himself to pull his daughter back from the jaws of the beast. But she had already reached it, and her death was immanent. The king watched his daughter murdered by the tiger, just as the first guard had reached it. He was far too late, as it takes a tiger mere seconds to destroy the human the body. But he was in time to kill the tiger. In a flash of time a long spear was stabbed into the rib cage of the tiger. It fell to the ground in a most ghastly fashion, writhing and contorting its figure into the most horrific positions. It was dying. It wasn’t dead, it was dying. No one knew what to think. A most handsome man was dead, the stunning princess was dead, and their killer had just been stabbed. Some of those in the arena looked towards their king for guidance, to see what he was doing. It was a natural tendency to look towards one leader for guidance when there is none to be found elsewhere. But the king looked worse than anyone in the arena felt. The tiger who he had just had killed had stolen a part of him. He had only two loves in his life, his government and his daughter. They were his legacy, what the future generations of the land would remember of him. Perhaps his daughter would even have had children, and his line would have continued. One kingly line through thousands of years; the tiger had murdered it. There was nothing left. He couldn’t think about anything. He felt lost. He didn’t even register the five hundred or more eyes watching him. One man would later describe him to his cousin as thus:
“….poor man, he looked ragged as some sort of ragged beggar. I mean, he was of course wearing regal velvets and gold jewelry. But he was covered in blood. He stained all everything he was wearing with the tiger’s blood. And you’ve seen his hair; he likes it an arm’s length and even keeps a part of it braided. You know what it looks like. But now it was coated in grim. It didn’t shine; it had more of a sickly grimy coat in it. And his face, which had always been in a state of content, was absolutely empty. It had a splatter of blood on it, and it stood out drastically against the blanch white of his skin. I’ve never seen a man look so broken. He was a king in the prime of his life, but he looked like a dead peasant.”
Seven days after the king had sat through the execution of his daughter, he was getting ready to leave his kingdom forever. It wasn’t just the guilt of having caused the death of his daughter, nor the fact that the entire city was in a state of near-shock. It was the need to end his own life and be done with his meaningless existence. There was no point in living. His people had seen him in his worse and he had no family. He could never take another wife and he considered it beneath him to adopt a son. His lineage was destroyed. And so he had concluded that it was in his best interest to leave. He was still not controlling his actions per say. He was really just responding to a couple base instincts. He woke up, ate, walked around a bit, and then went back to bed. Such a mundane existence did not catch the interest of the people, and they were beginning to doubt his aptitude for his position. He whole-heartedly concurred on a subconscious level. He left his own city never to be heard of again. He could never return.
The forlorn king was already five or six day’s journey from his city. He knew the land by heart, having been here his entire life. He knew it so well that he had no need to think as he progressed across the plains of his old kingdom. With so much time to think, he considered only the land. It was as if he was being drawn across the land in an invisible chariot. He just looked around and recalled what had happened at each the land marks he had spotted. There was the mountain on the horizon that he had once won a valiant battle against some wholly barbaric warriors. He had won that battle through sheer force, never relenting in his battle strategy. He reflected on how he had constructed his entire kingdom in such a fashion. He had pushed a single idea until it became a reality. And if no one liked the idea, he would prove how wonderful it was. He was a king; of course he had the best mind of all men! But then a small voice responded to this thought with a simple line. “Why is your daughter dead if you are so brilliant?” There was no response. The king quieted his mind after that.
After seven days of travel away from his former life, he realized he had eaten nothing since his silent departure. It was not a pleasant feeling as a man such as him should never need fast like this. He stopped walking and immediately regretted it. He fell down into the dirt in the same way a man dropped from a chariot might. He legs ached like they never before, as did his entire body. He then realized that he had not stopped walking in over six days. He had a canteen with him and he took a swig from that when his thirst became overpowering. But he had no food. It had not occurred to him that he might need to eat. Food had never been an issue at his palace, but now he knew he had to provide for himself now. It seemed odd for him, but another part of him accepted it. The barbaric part wanted to have to hunt and make the kill, skin the animal, eat the meat, and make a coat of the hide. The base instincts of his spirit, where no emotion can be experienced, were ready to live in the savage regality of nature, a refinement too far along for a cultured human to comprehend.
As he was hunting in a small glade he encountered a set of prints that call to him. They reminded him of something, but he could not place the animal. They were big, but they belonged to no bear. They were well-hidden, but belonged to no wolf. He soon recognized these tracks as belonging to the fiercest of creatures. His fear began to cause adrenaline to rush through his veins. Every sense became a warrior’s shield. He would hear, see, and smell the tiger before he was even close, and then he could run. He felt for a moment secure in his heightened senses, but then felt a cold shiver fall down his spine. He knew that he was in danger. He ran as fast as his legs could run, but they soon collapsed. They were tired from their journey from the city. They could bear no more weight this day. The man looked around in a panic, in a frenzy. Nothing he could do know would let him live. He resigned himself to death. It was not fear any longer, but anxiousness. He was ready to be killed.
The tiger sensed a weak prey, an easy kill. He dropped down from a tree he had been waiting in. With the most reserved of movements he made his way over to the felled creature. Normally he would have stayed away from a human, even if it was recumbent. But this one showed no resolve to live. It had laid down its barriers and no traps were present. The tiger moved closer to his prey. The man was his. But something stopped him from breaking his neck and completing his kill. Some sort of emotion was coming across his connection to the consciousness of all the tigers. It was connected to all tigers through this bond. All tigers thought so much alike that they had a near hive-mindset. If one tiger knew something, chances are all the rest knew it. Humans do not share the connection because they all lived on so many different levels of consciousness and had such varied thoughts.
The man turned around to look the tiger in its eyes. It did not have the instinctual look to it that would have ensured the man’s death. It had another sort of power. The beast’s eyes had a look in them that the king had never seen in any creature. Save for one. The king felt all the emotions from seven days in the past well up. The tiger too felt sorrow. He felt it in a very similar way, as the man’s concentrated sorrow was being shot off and would have affected any entity that came near the ragged creature. The tiger knew he could not harm this human; he had suffered enough. He turned to leave. As he did, the man looked up. This tiger had thrown down the chance to kill him. This tiger could feel.
It was a year later that the man found himself a top a mountain far to the north of his old city. But that had no meaning anymore. He had risen above the intense sorrow of his past. He had seen compassion in the eyes of a beast, and knew that if a beast could feel such love, than so could he. He had continued to walk for the year leading up to this mountain. The summit was not a destination, he knew, but more of a point in a circle. He was not planning on stopping at any juncture in his journey. He was just going to keep on walking until someone told him to stop, and since he had not spoken to a human in nearly a year, he knew that it would have to be a god who told him to stop. He smiled at life on top of that mountain. It was cold, but he wore no furs. He ported only a cloak and long stick that he had used to vault over waterways on his journey. Life was good for the time being. Nothing was holding him down, and he was free to be happy. No sorrow, no anger, no guilt, no greed. He had seen what he had done to so many people in the arena, but was not ashamed. He just took it as a lesson and kept on walking. He took lessons wherever he could in these times. He had stopped communing with merely himself when making a decision, but now spoke aloud to all that would hear. Sometimes he would get an answer, sometimes he was ignored. But it never mattered to him. He just laughed on his journey to nowhere. He hoped he wouldn’t get their too soon, because he was enjoying the view from right here.