Forgive me, Abigail, for I have come under false pretense. I cannot fathom the sorrow of thy oldest’s fratricide; yet, I come in glee. You see, I have laid docile, in wait for an invitation into the World Cemetery to save my dying kingdom.

I had heard of it in stories plenty, many a party stepping through the waxy underground chambers of Flicker Hall, along the narrow, broken white marble path, up towards the limestone cliffs overlooking a sea of rot. There, embedded stone against stone, would lay the entrance of the burial grounds — home to the revered and anointed, but, in reality, the final resting place of the wealthy.

Here I am joining history as my noble steed hastens through these caverns, dodging the hot wax dripping off the vaulted ceilings of the ancient grotto, intended to burn those destined to perish before their journey’s end. The pounding hooves crush the unlucky, forgotten skeletons strewn beneath like glass shards. Through the edge of the hood of my heavy cloak, I observe the droplets descending down formed stalagmites, gathered and traded to visitors as colossal candlesticks by The Charred. As generations of candle makers that once freely provided the comfort of candlelight to passing travelers during the Lunar Era, their skin has long sloughed off from handling the intense heat barehanded. They bear no attention to the mounds of wax accumulating on their stooped backs nor its implication of ruin for this is their final home.

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It pains me to gallop on, for I have a tendency to live in the past, savoring it, learning from my mistakes, and yearning for other paths.

Rushing ahead towards the burying ground, I make it cliffside and peer over the edge, watching the washed sediment of the Weeping Wallow. It houses the forsaken corpses of those families that neglected to pay their annual funeral dues in a putrid cesspool of waste. The muck’s rejuvenating properties hold off the further advancement of rot, leaving the bodies in a perpetual state of bloated decay. It is rumored that the groundskeepers rest fully submerged in the sludge, key to their everlasting vitality.

I am no better than they, for I am the embodiment of tainted royalty, drowning in the filth of my own doing, as a foolish old man that should have passed long ago. Yet, I remain here, dominant yet infertile, beating my chest, chanting, “mea culpa, mea culpa.”