The king looked back over the arch of earth that had received the full brunt of his determination. The tract was not razed, as he had done to this place those years ago, but reborn, and indifferent to his decisions. The land, he sighed, is free from regret. The only life those memories had for him, existed in the pressured insides of his person, haunting him, and curtailing the gate of his youthful ambition with uneasy short windedness.

Like the letters composed, his blood maniacal with passion for their recipient, but never sent, the parchments’ content, unbridled sentimentality, shelved, unable to bear the depth another’s view may have proffered. So they lingered in his mind, these erratic vignettes, like the ageless visage of his queen, in her radiance, lost to him before their skin fell, before the matter of their pleasures faded.

How can I get old? You just do, he thought to himself, the emptied glass drained in alarm, it’s lead crystal ringing, reckoning for him, that history is the slow degradation of the king’s reign.