The Alpha King Is Mad

KILLIAN Bryce Hensler, the kid who spoke at my kid's high school graduation ceremony gave a goddamn good speech. It was one that wasn't pretentious and didn't try to make him appear smart or very experienced. It was warm, clean, vulnerable—and perhaps my favourite quality of the speech— hilarious. The boy talked about the story of his life and how uninteresting it was. He appreciated his life anyways, saying, “a boring life with love ones is very much worth living”. It made me wonder whether my life could be deemed boring by anyone. When you're young, you're often pampered and shielded from the real world. You have books read to you and they take a permanent space in your little head. Life is easy, well, until it's not. It's either worse, or better— depending on how you see life— if you're royalty as I am. Depends on what your values are. As a member of the royal family in Agroman, you have everything at your disposal. When I say everything, I mean it. Power, wealth, fame— you name it. But that is what we think at first. We are raised to think that we have it all. But no matter how we try to deceive ourselves, we don't. Did I always know this? Uh... no, but it came around as I grew. Let me give you a little backstory here. My father, at least when he was alive, was, well, a tyrant. Just leave it at that. If there was ever anyone who should be labelled a tyrant, Tyrell Panis was that person. Agroman, as far as the pages of history were concerned, hasn't ever seen a ruler like Father, and now, that alone spoke volumes because his predecessors haven't been all about love and reason. But Father had made the people of Agroman come to learn that cruelness wasn't just an attribute when it came to their king; it was more of an art. Father was cruel, insensitive, sadistic, temperamental, narcissistic— you know what? Just throw in any related adjective and chances are, you would be right. Before I get on with talking about Father, I would like to tell you a bit about Wembourge. Wembourge was a realm that had three distinct parts often called: The East, West, and South. Father was the sole monarch of the whole of the East. The West consisted of ten independent lands and the South, seventeen. The whole of the East, large enough to be twenty independent lands, was just one land called Agroman and Father was the sole ruler. And just so you know, I didn't forget about the North. No one has been in the North before. Guess why? The North doesn't exist. There have been stories making baseless claims that savages lived there, but as I said, they are but stories. Deep down, I knew everyone was beyond convinced that there was nothing up North. There was no North. As Mother often said, "There is nothing beyond the blind sea." Now back to my initial point. I know I was spoilt as a child because, well, I think you get it. As a child, I got everything I needed with the snap of my fingers— and I mean this literally. But I also got a lot of fear from the people because everyone was shocked when Father officially took me as his own. I was often called the child that came from the egg in our indigenous language. Yeah, I know it was as bad as it gets, but knowing Agromanians, they could do way worse. What I never really got to understand was love. I mean, I never lacked maidens coming into my room to keep me warm, but I had no love for them, and vice versa. None of them really meant anything to me. Not even Griselda— the first woman I made love to. Until I met Tracy, love was that one word I never got to understand in the way it was often romanticised. Truth was, I didn't even think I deserved love. Well, it all changed when I met her. I recall goosebumps-giving detail when I had her in my bed for the first time. It was just days after I had met her again. I can recall my hands shaking like they never did before. I wanted to hold her, but a sort of feeling that I figured was fear came over me. She was different. There was this ineffability about her that was sometimes eerily enthralling. When we began to get closer, I was convinced she was the one for me. One stare from her as she smiled from her eyes was more than enough to move my world. “Baby, you're beautiful,” Tracy would say to me. She would call me ‘baby', and while that was awkward, I didn't just not mind it, I loved hearing anything she had to say. Every time Tracy laughed, I fell at least a foot deeper into her love. We were perfect together because we weren't— doesn't makes sense, right? Well, neither does love. Now it was many years after we had left Wembourge. During these years, we had gone back to check on Norris and hardly ever stayed more than three weeks. Wembourge as a whole was much safer— Norris made a fantastic king— but we built a life in what Tracy called ‘the normal world'. Of course, there had been challenges— especially when we had the twins— we had feared they would inherit my powers and lose the chance of living a normal life. Thankfully, we were wrong. Looking at Hayden and Hayley at the high school graduation ceremony, I was overjoyed that they were as human as everyone else. “You can't even hide the proud father look,” Tracy jested as she returned to her seat beside me. “Very funny being that you refuse to come along to the PTA meetings.“ Already chuckling, I said, “Went twice and had my fill. Those meetings are duller than death.“ We took pictures, celebrated, just like any other family. The kids, hopefully, will never know about Wembourge or how their Mum and I got a chance to build the life we had. But man, wasn't it a struggle?