All the time she was standing there, she never once took her eyes off me. It didn’t matter where I went, or what I did, her eyes stayed on me. Always.
I wanted to destroy that thing from day one. But how could a newly created King destroy The Statue of His Queen?
Could not do it while she lived.
Most certainly could not do it when she died.
Would not have looked right.
I felt like the only way I could get rid of it was if I married again, and made it known my new wife had asked for The Statue of the Late Queen to be removed.
A year and a half after she died, I married my mistress.
On the night of the wedding, before I could do the thing that was now legal, she walked in. The Statue of the Late Queen, whose eyes always followed me everywhere I went, turned my new bride into a statue whose eyes were dead. Then The Statue of the Late Queen walked back to its place, and stood there once again.
Her eyes never wavered away from me for one single second, even as she killed my bride.
Ever so stupidly, I tried it twelve more times. Hoping she would stop.
Every time, my newest bride was turned to stone before the marriage could be consummated. Their eyes became so empty and so dead.
And hers still followed me everywhere, every moment of every day and night.
Finally, when a sickness left me unable to ever get it up again, an earthquake destroyed The Statue of the Late Queen.
How I laughed when I found out.
Here I was, no longer watched. Free to marry if I so wished.
But unable to sire an heir.
When I die, my Kingdom will cease to exist.
I had hoped to have many heirs, and build a long lasting Kingdom. Instead, my wife died in an accident only a little before our first child could have been born. And her damn Statue kept me from ever having a child within marriage to someone else.
The terms of the marriage contract signed by her father and myself absolutely prohibited ever legalizing any bastard child of mine, and also the adoption of anyone else as a means to gain an heir for my Kingdom. A Kingdom consisting entirely of lands donated to me by him upon our marriage.
Half his Kingdom, on the condition I married his younger daughter. Which I gladly did.
But now that I have failed to beget an heir, once I die, my lands will once again belong to the Kingdom from which they originated. Well… A Queendom now.
My late wife’s elder sister, older than her by six minutes only, has inherited their father’s throne.
It’s funny… She looks exactly like her sister.
After me, my lands will be ruled by a spitting image of my late Queen.
And judging by the assassin’s blade now twisting in my gut, she has grown tired of waiting.
As I lie on the Palace floor, dying, I start to giggle. Joke’s on her: I have poisoned my crown.
Somewhere on the Palace ground, half hidden by overgrown grass, the broken lips of a statue speak: “Joke’s on him: As if I’d ever wear that ugly thing. When I can make my own.”
gyllenbogel 