A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

"If you stop using that title, you can remain as long as you want," Oliver said. He still found it jarring, and even more so when someone like Verdant said it. For that man said it with the utmost seriousness. He said it with strong enough emphasis that his hands seemed to be forcing Oliver to remain in the throne for all eternity.

"That is a compromise I can make," Verdant said, guiding his long coat down behind his legs, as he took a seat in the sand next to Oliver.

"Your servants are going to have a miserable time trying to get the sand out of that," Oliver said with a frown.

Verdant looked down upon himself, and smiled. "I would not burden them with that," he said. "I will at least see the sand thrown out myself, for it was my want that saw me sat down in it."

"Hm…" Oliver murmured, looking at him from the corner of his eye.

"You will make a good King, Oliver," Verdant said.

Oliver groaned. "Not this, Verdant, I do not wish to think on the matter."

"You care about the peasantry and the Serving Class far more than any could. I sit in the sand, and your first thought is to the servants that I might inconvenience with my actions. What other King has the knowledge of you? With such intimate understanding of what the daily woes of a peasant are like?"

"You mean, because I am one?" Oliver asked.

"Even before I knew such a thing, I knew of the time you'd spent with them, and the care you'd given them, under the tutelage of Dominus Patrick," Verdant said.

"It was not his tutelage that put me to such a degree of time with them, Verdant. I spent that much time with them because I am one of them. Where else would I go? A peasant village barely wanted to accept a scruffy outsider like me. You think they would have let me in the likes of Ernest?" Oliver said.

"Ah, but even in finding your new title, that did not see you changed, did it?"

Oliver shrugged, watching the flight of a seabird overhead, as it glided soundlessly, caught up in the strength of the sea breeze. "Who can say? Perhaps it did. I'm not sure the boy from that time would enjoy who it is I've become."

"Ah, that is surely a mistake," Verdant said. "You have shouldered great burdens, my Lord, and you have triumphed."

"Whilst all the while living in a lie," Oliver said.

"By your master's wishes," Verdant said.

"I could have seen it corrected long ago," Oliver said. "There were other times when I might have found the strength to say it."

"And risk all that you had built up? Who would that please? It would be needless self sacrifice," Verdant said.

"Would it be needless? We war against the High King for his corruption, but is my own title not corruption too? Founded upon a lie? Why is it so different to what he's done? It's not at all, Verdant. It's a lie, well and truly. A Kingdom should be founded upon a white heart. All mistrust, and filth should be burned away."

Verdant shook his head. "Comments like that, Oliver, are why you ought to lead regardless. You might have your doubts, but you have the heart for it. The difference between you and the High King? The nature of it. There's vagueness to the stories that we tell ourselves. Even truth at times is distorted by the Gods we so worship. A murky realm we dwell in, that even the nature of truth changes. Corruption, I believe, is knowingly going against nature."

"There are times when I have done just that," Oliver said, standing in a hurry. "Look! There's the nature that we resist."

He pointed to the rotting body of a large fish that had been washed up upon the beach a small distance away. A thin stretch of beach the Emerson's beaches were. The difference between high tide and low tide a thing of only a few metres.

"It rots away, and gives off the foulness of a stench. That's nature too, is it not? One moment we find ourselves as heroes, and the next we'll be tyrants. Now that we have the power to, it's within our capacity."

"And so the first thing you did was willingly see your power limited. You went along with Hod's plans of allying with the Emersons, but you found your own reason to do so – an honest reason, a pure reason, and you struck a cord with the man for it," Verdant said. "The honestness of the emotion shines through."

"I don't understand the difference," Oliver said. "As long as we live in a lie, I will not be able to hold up my head high any longer. I ought to tell them, before this goes too far, and we have too much of an effect on this country."

"It is already too far," Verdant said. "If we were to tell them, and the consequences were of the grim sort, what would you do, Oliver? What of the sacrifices that have been made, for the sake of our victory?"

"What is a victory when it is Tiberius' sort of victory? What's the point in getting what we want, when we play underhandedly in order to do so?" Oliver said.

"I do not think it to be underhanded," Verdant said. "For what reason ought matters to change, simply because you were born a peasant? It only adds to you, my Lord, it does not reduce you. You have borne a suffering through the years that we could not imagine. The scars on your back are that of a slave. Does your story not only add to your grandness?"

"You can say what you want, it still stands that we tell a false story to the realm. I am not the son of Dominus Patrick. Any reasoning they might draw dependent on that will be false."

"...Is the symbolic, at times, not even more true than that which is meant to be cemented as fact?" Verdant said.