A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 2109: My Kingdom - Part 5

Nelson ran endlessly, never seeming to tire. He was less horse, and more bird, or ancient dragon. The shaggy hair about his hooves swung up in the wind like small wings. That horse thirsted for freedom just as much as Oliver did. There was an animal touched by the Gods, Oliver was certain of it.

They crested a hill, and Oliver drew Nelson to a stop. He had to, or the animal would have run himself ragged until his heart burst. Here they could see for miles around. They could see the Tigris Forest already a great distance behind them. They could see a village off to the north, whose name Oliver had yet to know, with smoke rising up from many different settlements. He could see another crop of trees rising up, lonely in the plains, just a distance off to the north-east. And to the west proper, he could see an even more hilly region, strangely red. Oliver tilted his head and squinted, recognizing it to be heather.

"Moorland over there," Oliver realized, identifying it. He identified all of it, and with it, came an implicit understanding, that all these different places, even the village itself, belonged to him.

The pressure of the crown, how much he had wanted to toss it away – who was there to blame for that but him? Who was it that had chosen it, but him?

In the battle with Tiberius, he had felt himself a better person. A purer creature. So pure, that in all the time afterward, he had felt like a man of the highest corruption in comparison. Endlessly, he had searched to be that person again, to no avail. He had stumbled and made a mess of things, and only made his world feel more corrupt by comparison. Yet now, with a lightness in his heart, he could see that he’d had the wrong perspective from the start.

Why chase what was unobtainable? Was there not a more obvious thing to note within that? If that version of Oliver Patrick was so superior to the normal waking man, then why did Oliver allow himself to suffer so for the decisions that he had made? It was that version of Oliver Patrick that had chosen the crown. Did he merely do so to defeat Tiberius, or did his designs stretch onwards?

Oliver felt a chill, not from the wind, but from the excitement in his chest. A strange little smile on his lips, ever so arrogant, ever so confident. That version of him saw further than he ever could, and he had declared happily, without a thought, that he would assume the mantle of King.

Only now did Oliver begin to think that he was right in doing so. It was the mightiest storm that Oliver had ever thrown himself into. "But after all, Nelson, do you not think that we are equal to it?" He dared to ask it, even knowing the arrogance of the question. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

The horse jumped slightly off its two front feet, rearing up halfway, and giving a mighty neigh. His approval could not have been expressed more strongly.

Oliver clenched his fist. "It is not simply a question of victory, Nelson. We can do more than that – we can do it brilliantly. Can we not rely on ourselves? For who we are – for what we have endured. This is nothing compared to the past. There are too many resources. This isn’t suffering at all... This is hardly a war, hardly something to tear our hair out about. This... I think, as strange as it is to say, is pleasant."

When he surrendered to his situation, when he allowed him to accept that, after all, he was at war. After all, the story he thought might unfold, in quickly being rid of the High King, did not happen. It did not go the way he wished to. In resisting that fact, and in failing to accept it – that was when he had grown corrupt.

But it did not matter. He was here now, and the way things had ended up, they weren’t so bad after all. An entire Kingdom unfolded before him, and he had the opportunity to do right by it.

The wind seemed to howl on his behalf. Even the ground beneath his feet seemed to begrudgingly extend towards him, to accept his right to it. Barely though.

For the crown on his head, the time that he had spent in the forest, he could recognise that this wasn’t his. He was King, as the people beheld him to be, but as the Gnomes had said, the land was yet to recognise it.

That part mattered not. What preoccupied Oliver’s attention was the difference in feeling of the place. Now that he paused to feel it, with the cold wind biting into him, and he closed his eyes to feel the ground beneath his feet, he could not fail to notice that where he stood now lacked the magic of where he had stood just hours before.

It wasn’t just that it wasn’t as pretty. It was like there was something more seriously wrong with the place.

Oliver allowed Nelson to begin to walk, for the horse had been wishing to pull away for a little while. They scrambled down the rocky hilltop, and came towards a little stream. Here Nelson stopped, and turned his head, looking back on Oliver as best as he was able to.

"Hm?"

Oliver looked down on the stream that he was pointing to. He couldn’t see anything about it that was worth his attention. It looked well enough... But then it didn’t feel quite right. It was a difficult thing to identify, or even to be sure that it existed.

Oliver dismounted, and crouched down by its side. He stuck a hand into its depth as he had in the Tigris Forest stream just the night before. He closed his eyes, and the stream pulled at him, its flow fighting against him... And then grasping at him, dragging something away from him, begging for something from him.

The stream in the forest had felt like a push to Oliver’s back, in the way it had compelled him forward. The waters of the Tigris River, and the forest, had made his heart feel light and heavy. This stream did the opposite to him. It brought about a darkness that he was especially sensitive to. A feeling in his heart that brought all his terrors to the fore, and made him twitch mightily, without really knowing why.