The First Days of the Next True King

When I sat down to write, I fully intended to formulate a general description of how an absolute ruler assumes sovereignty. That will come next. Instead, below are my musings on what the next one might be like, how his vision might come to him, and how he might fulfill it. Forgive the overwrought prose at the beginning and the dry martial conjecture at the end.

Kingdoms stretch across the expanse of the written word. The mythos of ascendant kings sparked life into the most prolific, enduring, and beautiful of the literary traditions. If you care to uncover the origins of a golden era of storytelling, you will almost always find the good rule of a good ruler at its heart—and lamentation of the loss of another at its end.

In worlds real and made real in art, of days past and yet to come, the kingdom stands as a transcendent monument to its people, land, and rulers. Their names and stories weave threads of order, harmony, and glory into the tapestry of mankind’s eternal ascent toward perfection. The kingdoms of the tapestry serve well to inspire the creation myth of the next. I’m curious as to how those first few lines will read.

I won’t venture a guess as to the next king’s origins, but they will be humble compared to his destination. Perhaps his family is wealthy, and his access to the finer things stokes the flames of incessant desire within him; or his family is poor, and his escapes to other worlds sever his ambitions from reality; or else his upbringing is hideously mundane, bearing no burden but granting no purpose, sending him on a frantic search for a way to right the wrongs around him until, having nowhere else to look, he finally turns inward.

No matter what, he will have grander visions than most.

Somewhere along the way, he will come to realize something about his innermost drives. To do so, he’ll have to be of sharp mind and sound body. The latter, I believe, is of certain importance; for his visions to take physical shape, he will need some understanding of himself with respect to his surroundings.

Finally, he will need to be naturally intuitive and prone to reflect. It will take a great effort of both to admit what he knows to be true. If it were easy for a man in solitude to say, “I should be King,” our past would be much more violent than it already was. I suspect this will be the most difficult part of the process; the conclusions which follow, such as the extent to which he will grasp—of course, as far as he can reach—will do so easily. The rest is a matter of his natural abilities and luck.

Committed to his goals, he will make a plan. The level of detail will depend on his distance from the decisive action: Declaration of sovereignty and establishment of secure borders. In turn, that distance will be determined by the land within his borders as well as a great many number of other things. Taking the other factors into account, I figure his map sketch will undergo at least a few revisions. However, the time between drawing the first and the decisive action will converge on long enough to give himself time to change his mind, but short enough to sate his desire to act.

Regardless of the plan, one of the constants will be soldiers, and the constant among those is those he can know—roughly 150 is the natural number, any significant difference arrived at with due caution. Among these “happy few,” there will be his closest friends, then his commanders, and then his most capable fighters. He could secure his kingdom with these alone, however small, but he would never make the attempt without a single one of them. His closest friends, known for their kindred spirits and time-tested commitment to purpose, will steel his resolve on the road ahead. His commanders, known for their tactical skill and unending pursuit of victory, will see the plan through. His most capable fighters, known for their bravery and love of battle, will personally ensure the outcome at the decisive points of combat.

He must make himself and his intentions understood as fully as possible to them. What this entails, I cannot possibly guess, and he can only hope as to the result.

Those he can know will follow his lead, but if he deems it necessary to gather an army beyond them, he must understand his impersonal nature to them and take all risks and limitations involved into account.

Prior to but near the decisive action, he will select an emergency successor among his closest friends and let it be known to all whom he knows. Should succession occur, necessary or not, what follows will be a testament to his kingdom’s inevitable victory or defeat.

On the day of declaration of sovereignty, he will officially inform the neighboring state or states. He should have strong insight into likely enemy courses of action and prepare accordingly. No matter what military response comes, or whether it comes at all, his martial skill will have already been put to the first test; there’s only so much to be determined afterward.

The defense plan should detail a series of discrete cessions of land into a new set of readily defensible borders. Every cession should be done so grudgingly, but as necessary.

Of course, the outcome of the plan and what will need to be done toward its completion cannot be known in advance. There will always be risks involved; he’ll have to decide which to incur, which to mitigate, and which to allow pause.

If borders are successfully established, their security will be far from certain at first. Ensuring as much will be his first actions as king. From there, the lines of possibility diverge. Perhaps later I’ll consider some likely scenarios and what they might look like, and I’ll present them if I think they’re of any value.