In the Throne Room

The Queen is sitting.

The Queen is sitting on her throne.

It has been a year.

The peasants who work the fields enter and ask that she bless them. They need her blessing, because it hasn’t rained, and when it starts to rain, it’ll never stop, and the Queen has a direct line to the Almighty, and so, as such, she must be able to start and stop the rain at intervals that will replenish the crops without drowning them.

The Queen gives a blessing, but it’s a measured prayer. She needs to leave room for what will happen if it doesn’t rain or if it rains too much.

Outside there is no sign of rain, but there is a black cloud that has been dawdling over the kingdom’s exterior for several months, promising destruction, but biding time.

Priests and holy men enter the throne room and ask the Queen to pray for the cloud to disseminate so that the sun will shine and the mood in the kingdom will improve.

They have prayed, but they are not a Queen. The Queen’s prayers travel farther and engage the Lord in ways the spiritual leaders of the land would dare not try to comprehend.

These are the same men who tell the Queen she cannot rise from the throne until all she has bestowed blessings on everyone under her rule, for people are suffering, and they need a touch of the divine to carry on with their lives.

Her coronation was on the same day that the intimidating cloud appeared, and she was whisked from the cathedral straight to the throne room. She’s been there ever since, watching a line of people enter so that she may place her scepter on their shoulder and assure them that they are beloved by Him and so they have nothing to fear.

After a month, she is sure that she is starting to see some of the same peasants again, and her helpers inform her that, yes, some people are returning, because the grace they felt after her first blessing upon them seems to have faded, and they would like another.

Who is she to refuse?

She is the keeper of their sound minds and faithful hearts. When these people go to the bed at night, they first say a prayer of thanks for her. How can she forsake them when all they ask is an expeditious moment of kindness that could sustain their spirit for weeks to come?

O, but if only ten or twelve of them could find their lives improving so that they would not need to return over and over again, keeping the Queen on her throne when she would be much better suited to other rooms in the castle where decisions are being made and policies enacted.

When her father grew ill, the Queen had started marking down the ideas she had for how to improve things like farming and trade in the kingdom, and she was so eager to get to work. Her father barely ever sat on a throne and worked to inspire people with platitudes, for he felt that they would be unnecessary provided he helped to ensure that there was food in their pantries and shelter whenever a cloud would appear.

She does notice that her cloud is so much larger than any her father had to contend with, and it seems as though whatever progress he had made in elevating the kingdom’s morale had vanished as soon as she had been put in power.

The duties she had planned to tend to were carried off to other rooms where she was told they would be cared for until she was able to do something about the discouragement sweeping through the land like a pestilence.

She finds herself hallucinating that the dispiritment is something like a man in a robe making his way from home to home, entering in the night, and whispering words of despair into the ears of those for whom she is responsible.

They go to bed with hope and wake to find that somehow, despite the protection of the moon, they have awoken to less than they had only hours earlier. How can it be?

The Queen would like to hunt down that man. That Man in the Robe who keeps her on this throne and tells her she should be grateful to him, for sitting on a throne, and never moving is so much easier than trying to lead.

Look what leading did to her father.

A man splintered by the constant menace of war and famine. A man who was born with a peaceful temper only to see it exhausted by decades of deterred progress and internal brinkmanship.

Her two brothers were slaughtered on the battlefield.

She would never leave the throne.

What was there to be upset about?

One night, the requests don’t bother to stop long enough to allow her a good rest. She had complained earlier in the day to the men of her court that she was determined to arise from her seat in the coming days despite any protestation they might have, and now she suspected they were doing their best to cripple her with debilitation so they could commit her to a cell the same way they had her mother when she insisted that she would not give the kingdom any more boys they could send off to die in wars that would never end.

How can one steel one’s self against a plot to immolate it even as the flames erupt through the doubtful parts of the soul?

All evening long, the dreary peasants enter, plainly forced to do so by the Queen’s detractors, begging for a change, any change, any sign of clarion or calm.

The Queen tried her best to appear cognizant, but as the sun begrudgingly made its path back to the castle, she found her forehead to be tinged with gold. Her legs velvet. Her arms and hands the same sort of wood that splintered her father. Her scepter remained in its form, but her eyes would close and beg forgiveness, for they could not reopen.

Several hours later, the news would spread that the Queen had perished after giving all she had to her kingdom and its residents. She would be spoken of as inefficient and ineffective, choosing to be a symbol rather than a siren.

And all her prayers would be forgotten.

As most prayers usually are.