Mad?

Mad? Me? There’s just no way. I deny any such notion. Me? A king no less of this very realm, where I have worked endlessly night and day to bring my realm to the heavenly state we are in now. My subjects are happy, I do my best to make sure they’re all accommodated. Weekly audiences with myself the king where I will always do my best to have one of my many servants or Confidants document their transgressions. Once a month they get the opportunity to celebrate yours truly for all the hardships i go through on a daily basis. That’s a monstrous leap from anything my father the former king had set in place. He was extremely ill in the head, rest his soul. He let all the mentally taxing duties of a king get to him, but not I. It doesn’t bother me that I have to be woken up by the light of the sun, whenever it hits me, because the guards and the guards who watch my guards can not be trusted to watch my royal head slumber. I have the best chefs in all of these 9 realms but I still am out at all hours of the day just to hunt game to feed myself. It’s the best though i can assure you, my 15 meal testers, always tell me despite the impending fear of each bite being their last, because of some attempt on my life that its to die for so I willingly take their word for it. Of course my counsel gets concerned about me hunting on my own food to eat but what choice does one have when the only way to dethrone a sitting king is by assassination, so what sense does it make to take anybody out there with me armed where nobody would ever see what could transpire. No, no the counsel are not my friends I would cringe at the mere thought. Confidants maybe to a certain degree but the closer you get to anybody as a king the more of a threat they are to you. The more they see you vulnerable the easier it becomes to plunge a knife into your back. Keeping everybody at an arms distance can be cripplingly isolating, an entire kingdom, an entire realm, and I am completely and utterly alone. Just left to my vices and to sit and talk to the portraits and the cold unjudging eyes of rulers that came before myself because they too had felt this fear and anxiety but most of all sadness that we are unable to have a meaningful relationship with anybody because power is what we are taught to value from infancy. Power runs the world not money and most certainly not love. If that were the case i would be able to have children of my own and take a wife whom i love but alas i cannot. They deem me mad because I keep to myself, because i have no wife to bed and because I trust nobody because people only see power when they look at the king. Not a person. I had taken to literature because the only man i seem to able to trust is me myself and i do reiterate that this realm does not have a mad king. Not the isolation nor the falsification of human interaction and emotions I get on a Daily basis or the fact that my own fathers desiccation is the very cause for my rise to power. Mad? Never mad. If your king was mad how could he, the youngest of 7 boys rise to power and take the throne? They confuse madness with ambition. And to my brothers may they all rest peacefully, you’re welcome for taking on this burden for I wouldn’t wish this lonely pseudo-existence on any man. You, my brothers of all people knew what power could do to those around you. I just figured it out first.