Some days, I dream of heroes.
Sound in the audience chamber, nervous voices. A stammer, a shudder, a twitch, a plea. The door cracks open and a worried face shoves in a terrified one.
My eyes are already open. They cannot shut anymore.
Mercy, mercy, mercy. It’s saying something about mercy. It didn’t mean to, it’s not its fault, it would never have done that thing if only it would have known, honest ignorance, mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy.
My hand raises and it falls down, and I’m alone again as the footfalls of my panicked acolytes skitter down the foyer like spiders.
Time to sleep. I can’t sleep anymore, but gods do I ever try. Some days I even fool myself.
Some days, I dream of heroes. Noble faces and determined eyes and no matter what the stature or shape of the oncoming threat, it’s backed by a spine that’s unbending, harder than steel.
High noon on a holy day. I’m not sure which one, there’s dozens and dozens of the fucking things now, so many I’m amazed they haven’t dedicated one to my toenail-clippings. There’s a holy day for my birth, a holy day for my death, a holy day for when I rose again, a holy day for when I defeated the Prinnish army and decapitated their general with a wave of my hand and a smile. I could smile then. I had a nice smile – I have a nice smile. It’s just now there’s no lips in the way and it won’t turn off no matter what I want.
I smile at the sacrifices and the offerings, smile at the ritual mutilations, smile and smile at the choirs and the hymnals and the absolute, pants-filling terror manifest in the eyes of each and every single human in the cathedral, and when they all file out and the candles die down I’m still smiling.
Some days it doesn’t seem worth it.
Some days, I dream of heroes. A sword swings, a spell chants. I am bearded in my lair, cornered like a fat old bear come out of his den in midwinter. There are rants and ravings and curses and some good bloody honorable deaths from horrible magics.
I have so many horrible magics. One for each bone in my body, and the skeleton of a human – even a very large human such as myself – contains two hundred and six bones, two hundred and six mindless, stubborn lumps of mineral and meat that will mend and build and stand firm regardless of what life chooses to tell them. That’s real power in there, that’s a force you can bend kingdoms around and distort lives against and tear down palace walls with. Which I did. And I have. And look at all the good that it’s got me, here on my pile of broken thrones, with an entire empire prostrate at my feet. With my eyes that won’t shut and my smile that never ends and my overflowing dish of sacrifices that I couldn’t eat even if I liked the blood of innocents and the hearts of virgins.
Some days I miss bread and jam, good blackberry jam.
Some days, I dream of heroes. A whisper at first, a half-hoped prophecy that only the peasants hear (I never knew how they did that, even when I was a peasant). Then it grows and spreads into a rumour, a murmur in the streets and fields that my guards and priests and captains attempt to stifle and quash in their cruel, ham-handed way. Finally a luckless messenger stammers out a rambling, incoherent, self-serving explanation to me and I kill him for his spineless presumption just as they burst in the door, with the sunlight pouring in behind them.
A luckless messenger is talking to me right now, because it’s his turn to tell me about the treasury and the tax rates and the tributes and the vassals and the vassal-states and the states that very much don’t want to become vassal-states and behind every word he speaks is a single thought and that thought is ‘please don’t kill me.’
I listen. Well, I try to listen. I don’t nod, though – that makes him flinch. So I sit and stare and fail to keep my mind from wobbling and I wish I still had the energy I did back in the first month of this business, when I honestly, truly, really did try to understand how the hell this place was run. Then I had to execute half my officials for treason and venality and after that well hell what’s the other half worth if it wasn’t letting me know about that sort of thing?
Not so much treason nowadays. Not so much anything. Doing anything could get you killed.
A corpse is alive, even in death. Rotting, rotting, feeding a thousand thousand THOUSAND little bellies each night, spawning millions of babies, putting food in the ground. What good’s a corpse that won’t rot? What good’s an empire that won’t change?
Some days I think that thought and it won’t leave my head.
Some days, I dream of heroes, and more than once I imagined myself as their leader. Some days their wise counsellor. Some days their admirer from afar, some days the hostage they were sworn to rescue.
I was going to make a difference. I was going to change the world. I didn’t know I’d personally exterminate nineteen royal families and countless regular, everyday families, but I’d accepted that by the time it happened. Those things happen in a world of heroes and heroism and dashing swordsmen and wise, pious sages. So I wasn’t a hero. So I was a villain. All I had to do was wait, and scheme – I could scheme, I assumed at that age, how hard could it be? – and there they would be. Like moths to flame, are heroes to villains. Moths to flame.
They would stand before me, and we would battle, and if I wouldn’t lose then, I’d lose to their children, or grandchildren. Maybe I would return, maybe I would not.
But the last thing I would see would be their faces.
Some days, I dream of heroes. And oh how I wish those dreams were true.