The king, the imp and the end

It is a glorious view from up here. I have always liked this place, a hundred feet up in the air, although I hate the fact that there are no elevators to get down. The quiet darkness was broken by something other than the twinkling city lights.

“Someone is coming”
“Hmm.. Yeah”

At that moment, I hoped for someone to have fallen off these treacherous stairs ten years before and hoped against hopes that it was just his ghost climbing up the stairs for his usual drift into thin air.

“Ah! I knew it! I knew it! I knew you guys would be here”

A friendly kick on my 6th rib from the top, some profanities uttered, my name called a few times and I drifted off again.

“Don’t lie! Look at him- he’s gone! Anything left? Where is it?”

One more ride of the magic dragon? I firmly chose not to, very firmly.

“Come on! Nothing is going to happen. Here”

Very firm was evidently not good enough. I decided to repent on my moral integrity some other time.

And then the night engulfed me. Words can’t describe what it is to sit so high, so high, deafening silence broken by the incessant chatter of the leaves in the breeze. To witness the bullet ridden midnight blue of the skies, the starry canopy showing shapes that weren’t there a moment before- convinced that god ever geometrizes- that is truly psychedelic. I looked at the road ahead and went off on another one of those tangents that lead nowhere.

“Have you heard of the story of the King and the Imp?”

“No”

“Do you want to?”

“Of course, tell me”

“Well, a long but not forgotten time ago in a place which was not much different from this humdrum lived a great king. He was not the greatest, but he was great in as much as his ruthlessness and the words of his sycophantic poets would permit him to be. He was firmly made to believe that he mattered, much more than the thousand people he ruled and more than all that did matter.”

“You mean 'Not a blade of grass moves without your diktat my Lord' mattered”

“Yes, precisely. I can't tell you how or why such priggishness was instilled within him, but I can tell you that the king knew what he will and will not tolerate, desperate to control all and everything.”

“So, on fine day the King, with a party of the elite guard, decides to go hunting to the edges of his kingdom where he spots on a hill the most beautiful of forests”

“What is that?” asked the king
“It is the forest of Isis, sire, that what resuscitates the barren lands of our realm every spring”

“No, sire” continued the minister, “ we should not enter the forest. It falls beyond your realm and it is said a wicked imp inhabits those lands”

“I conquer the realms I lay my eyes upon” said the king, and marched on, unperturbed.

And so, as would be expected, the king gets separated from his troop within the forest. After days of wandering, the now stricken king reaches a lake like he's never seen before and on a rock by the lake shore, he spots a cheery little boy with the eyes of an angel and the tail of the devil surrounded by a docile pack of dogs.

The king, his physical strength drained and irate at his own plight, walks up to the kid when he notices the dogs don't exactly welcome him.

Surprised at the nonchalance of the boy, the king stands back staring as the boy gets off his high rock and walks to the king. He promptly puts a dog collar with a huge stone around the king's neck and says- “ I expect to be bowed to”

The king, dragged down by the stone and furious at the treatment, yells “ Do you know who I am?” to which the boy replies, “Do you know where you are?”

For days, or perhaps months, the chained king endures what seem to be pointless travails across the most resplendent of lands. As they rest across a fountain of the bitterest water the king has ever tasted, the king resumes his daily rites of pleading- “Spare me”, says the king “and I shall see to it that the forest is never trespassed”

The boy scoops a handful of water from the fountain and pours it into the mouth of the king. The water is miraculously sweet and the with a touch the stone is now a glittering diamond of unsurpassed beauty.

“You are free to go” said the boy.

To cut an already long story short, the king having tasted the water from the fountain, returns to take the boy captive and atop a tower much like this one, the boy is tortured for days, stoned and dowsed with water for that elusive hope of extracting a miracle.

“My magic is in my solitude” grimaced the boy as the king stabbed him with his steely knife. “A worthy king you are,” he continued- “so fervent in your belief that your stupid idiosyncrasies need be tolerated and not scoffed upon. That you deserve to be noticed and cared for because you possess the most banal of all the virtues”

“Of the divinity held captive within you, you know naught, and when I am done with you, you shall know the difference there is, between you and me””

Thus saying I grabbed that obnoxious tormentor of mine and jumped, to be the very ghost I desired to come to my rescue.