The Aged King and the Nearly as Aged Dragon

“Readers weigh in on Biden: Please go, Joe. Most don’t think he can win again and wish he’d make a graceful exit.” — Headline from op-ed in the Boston Globe, 7/17/24

Once upon a time, there was a marvelous king. Well, “marvelous” may be an overstatement, but most reasonable people agreed that he’d done a decent job, considering the pragmatic impossibility of ruling his fractious land and the low bar set by many previous kings. More importantly, four years earlier, he had earned the people’s eternal gratitude by slaying a dragon that had seized the throne and terrorized them.

But now the dragon had come back to life, resurrected by its cowardly minions who could have kept it dead but, tired of putting out numerous fires it had set around the countryside, basically decided it was easier not to. Now, the dragon’s tail itched to smite those who had dared cross it, and flames of the deepest orange spewed out of its puckered maw.

The people needed a hero to vanquish the dragon once again, yet the king was aged. It was hard to hear and understand him on the few occasions he orated (notably, he had given the fewest orations from his throne of any modern ruler, and on the occasions he did, he was clearly reading off a scroll). His crown, once jauntily perched atop his head, now slipped feebly to one side. Even when he wore his robe slightly open at the neck, in the style of younger kings, it just made him look like a retired king from the Land of Heat who spends his days cruising other lands by galleon.

It must be said that the dragon, too, had become aged in the four years since its slaying. Its roars, previously a semi-intelligible clatter of guttural sounds, were now completely incoherent. As if in compensation, its small arms and claws gestured ever more frantically. Its wings were obviously being dipped in some kind of unguent for preservation, but up close, they just looked weird. The dragon’s diet, consisting solely of fizzy brown swamp water and raw cattle, surely didn’t help, nor did the fact that it no longer flew anywhere on its own but instead rode around on the back of another dragon that it had the power to steer.

Despite all its signs of deterioration, the people had to admit that the dragon still seemed as vital and powerful as ever, which made, like, zero fucking sense. Any other dragon who drank only swamp water and ate only raw cattle and never flew anywhere would be dead by now. Meanwhile, the king often rode the jester’s unicycle and ate a balanced diet of potatoes and well water, but the people would brace for a fall anytime he stepped off the gangplank of the royal warship.

The people were in agreement: the king must abdicate the throne, pass the torch that was kept beside the throne for illumination, and allow a younger ruler to take on the dragon, because the very future of their monarchy was on the line. Plus, if they had to deal with four more years of the dragon’s nonstop roars, that was, in all seriousness, nearly as bad.

So the people asked the king to abdicate, expressing their respect and pointing out that he could be a hero once again by putting the needs of the land above his own. They said that, while they knew, of course, that he could still rule the land capably, the perception by those who didn’t follow palace intrigue carefully was that he couldn’t slay the dragon, and that was all that mattered here because, let’s be honest, regardless of which non-dragon occupied the throne, their policy was going to be the same incrementalist feudalism they’d always had.

They were very careful in the way they stated this, because no one likes being told they’re too aged. Moreover, the king had a reputation for overcoming the odds, such as his recovery from a jousting contest in his youth in which it was revealed that he had stolen another jouster’s lance.

The people were in a bind, because this stubborn defiance that had made the king a successful ruler now made him unwilling to leave the throne. They beseeched him to reconsider, for it was just so fucking obvious that the dragon would smite and roast him, and while that meant the people would suffer under the dragon’s rule in eternity, the king would get to limp off in exile to the Land of the Great River and eat cold creams delivered by ship from the Land of Ice.

Yet he would not, and it reminded the people of the helplessness that had afflicted them when the dragon had sat on the throne. They needed a miracle. Perhaps a quorum of lords would decide to hold a jousting mini-contest for the kingship. Or the king would suffer a fall from horseback—not a serious tumble, of course, but one that would give him cover to step down from a vicious dragon fight.

Neither of those things appeared likely, so the people remained exceedingly tense, which also reminded them of how it felt to live under the dragon’s rule, and which sucked, because the whole point of their land was that it was supposedly a better land to live in than any other land, but it was becoming increasingly apparent that this wasn’t the case, and many of them were looking into other lands that might take them.

And so they held out distant hope that the king would simply wake up one morning, look in the mirror at his aged visage, and pass the torch by the throne.

In that event, though, the people also hoped he wouldn’t simply pass the torch to his viceroy—who would certainly be a competent king, no one was questioning that, don’t get them wrong—but whose orations had an overly rehearsed feel to them, and it seemed like the dragon would probably smite and roast her too.