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The sun had filled his entire world, spreading out from the center of the sky to eat the ground and sea and his own flesh.
Except for one little black speck smushed underneath his arm where it stretched on the searing rocks.
“Hello,” said the king.
“Hello,” said the ant.
“What are you doing here, ant?”
“The same thing as you, I think. Dying.”
“Good eye.”
“I mostly find my way about by smell, actually.”
“Hmm. How do ants smell?”
“TERRIBLE.”
They laughed for a while about that.
“I’m out of my mind, I think. The sun’s eaten me up, and soon my heart will stop. The ungrateful peasants have turned against me. And now I’m talking to an ant.”
“Why not talk to ants? We’re much easier to find than humans.”
“True, true,” said the king. “But I’m a king. I didn’t talk to ants. I talked to humans. Well, I talked at humans, and then they did things for me.”
“Why?”
“Because I was a king. If they didn’t do what I said they’d end up in trouble because I knew best and everyone knew it. Don’t you have queens?”
“Yes, but they’re basically egg factories.”
The king thought about some of the more bitter arguments he’d had over the course of his marriage. “I think my wife would have agreed with you, but wouldn’t have appreciated it.”
“What did YOU do if you weren’t an egg factory?”
“I told you: I reigned. I told people to build high walls and they built them; I told them to till the soil and they tilled it; I told them to stab my brother’s army to death and they stabbed them good and proper and I got to put his head on a pike.”
“What did you do with it after that?”
“I think I threw it out once it was down to the bone.”
“Wasteful.”
“It could’ve been any old head by then, there was no point to it anymore. What would YOU have done?”
“Eaten it,” said the ant. “It’s every member’s duty to feed the colony.”
“Then why are you sitting here?”
“You sqooshed half my abdomen with your elbow. I can’t move under my own power.”
“Oh.” The king had never felt the urge to apologize in his entire life, and he didn’t feel it now. But he was a little embarrassed.
“Why’d you do that, anyways?”
“I didn’t really want to sit out here. I’ve been couped, you see. My wife poisoned half my cabinet and persuaded the peasants to rise up against the other half. Said I was a blithering incompetent.”
“Are you?”
“No idea but it doesn’t matter much, does it?”
“Suppose not.”
“It’s impious to spill divine blood though, so they’ve staked me out on the stones here to bleach until the world does for me instead. After that they’ll probably crucify my remains over the castle gate until they get too raggedy.” He sighed, and wished for a breeze. “So, what did YOU do with yourself?”
“I dug a lot of tunnels and I helped murder and consume many caterpillars and I reared countless eggs to adulthood and I battled valiantly against the evil and perfidious Other Colony and in a few minutes when my sisters follow my scent trail to your elbow I’ll probably be repurposed as food for the young, so that I may continue on as part of the colony amongst the stomachs of my infant kin.”
The king squinted at the ant, or thought he did. His eyes weren’t really working as they should anymore. A curious sensation was worming about inside him, a very unkingly one.
Oh. Shame. Yes, he’d heard of this. How bizarre.
“You know…” he managed, “on the whole, you’ve probably been a lot more useful than I was.”
“Thanks,” said the ant. “But don’t be too hard on yourself. Your life is hundreds of times more valuable than mine.”
“Really?” asked the king, voice wobbling.
“Really,” said the ant, with deep sincerity.
And it was telling the truth, because even bleached-out by two days of exposure there was an awful lot of protein left on the king by the time the ant’s colony found them both six minutes later.