A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 2108: My Kingdom - Part 4

"Yes, yes," he said. "You’re a handsome horse." He patted Nelson, and Nelson snorted, and went back to his grazing, having apparently acquired the compliment that he was looking for.

The peace of the place, when Oliver allowed his mind to properly settle, brought to his attention increasingly those wounds of his heart. They manifest not in the terrifying way that they had when he had considered them elsewhere. They came instead as something obvious.

He considered them, and he realized with a start. "Obviously my heart aches... Things have been objectively terrible."

He laughed as he said that. It was a simple enough thing to state. But what a fool was he that he could not even admit that to himself before now – that things were bad, and they had been bad for some time. The matter with Asabel was one thing, but before that there was his time spent as a slave. The death of his family that he had never quite come to terms with. He hadn’t considered any of it properly, he had just held himself tighter and tighter, ignoring the pain.

And suddenly, it had the opposite weight to it. Suddenly, he didn’t feel like the weak man that he’d felt of late, when he felt the dull aching pain. Suddenly, he was confused as to how he had managed it – to have lasted all those years. It didn’t feel like him at all. It was like considering a different person.

Beam – how in the name of the Gods had Beam managed it? Every one of those days as a slave, they were filled with suffering. Years he had endured. Years and years. Far too long. Far too cruel an amount of time.

Oliver knew that he could not do it again. If someone had told him that it would be such a length of time, filled with such suffering, then there was no chance that he would ever have repeated it. He shook his head. The him that had endured his past, and somehow found the strength to go on. There was a pride in that.

His smile turned into something different, when he considered the crushing state of his mind when he had found Asabel’s head. And yet, he had found the strength to fight through that. Pride, overwhelming pride. His greatest victory, and it was achieved in such circumstance.

He opened his eyes. "It turns out, Nelson, I don’t think we’ve done so bad after all," he said.

The horse gave a whinny in agreement.

"Though things are still tough," Oliver said, rising up to pet him. "We’re still in the midst of war."

The horse ignored its grass for a time, and allowed Oliver to quietly stroke the white hair of its neck, as he thought on current circumstance. "And, I still don’t know quite what to do," he admitted. "I don’t know what course of action we can take, to firmly secure us victory. I feel as if what we are doing now is fine... But I thought that too, when we were allied with the Emersons."

"...Well, I suppose I am not going to solve it all at once. I never knew what I was doing before either, it just worked out," Oliver said. "We will do well enough... Come," he said. "We’re almost free of the forest. I think it’s about time we went for a proper ride."

They negotiated the last bit of the forest together, with Nelson winding his way past the low hanging branches of trees to ensure that Oliver would not be knocked flying. Then they were bursting free of that little realm of magic, so full of life, and so pure, and they were racing across the open plains, stretching out for miles and miles.

Oliver pushed his heels to Nelson’s sides, and the two of them went faster. He remembered a time when he had not known how to ride at all – when he could not even have dreamed of owning a horse. And now he had all this freedom. The wind rushing through his hair. An entire Kingdom that he could ride along and call his own.

A feeling of exhilaration spread across his chest, as they went even faster. Without Oliver asking him of it, Nelson pushed himself to an all out gallop. The ground here was good for it. It was still hard from the cold, not quite yet entirely free from the grips of winter like the Tigris Forest was. It was grey here, and drizzly. The sun couldn’t quite pierce through the clouds. But with the wind rushing through Oliver’s hair, beneath his helmet, and the crown upon his head threatening to go flying off, he could not have declared himself happier.

He closed his eyes, feeling very much like he was flying. A Kingdom! An entire Kingdom was his! He laughed at the thought. All the pressure it brought, all the responsibility, all the stress. And then, when a lighter part of him looked deeper, beneath all that restriction there was this. That beautiful, endless freedom, where the land he walked upon was all his. When the hills he looked towards in the distance too were all his. When every tree, every blade of grass, fell under his dominion.

It was not the ownership by itself that excited him, it was the freedom for how he remembered things used to be. When he was first freed from slavery, and he was looking for some place to go. Every scrap of land was owned by someone. Everyone had staked a claim, and everyone was looking for some place to chase him. He had longed then for the tiniest little plot of land he could call his own. Even in the Black Mountains with Dominus, he hadn’t felt truly secure, for any hunter could pick a fight with him as a lowly peasant, and declare that he did not belong there. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

It was the insecurity of a man that had nothing, no perch, no family, nothing to rely on. And now somehow, at perhaps one the lowest points in Oliver’s life, the worst time he thought himself to have had since he was freed from slavery there was this. This gift that he had accidentally seized for himself.