An old king sat on a simple throne, weary and aged and blind. High up in his keep he rested and breathed with a hand on his chin. No hair adorned his barren scalp, but a grey beard hung twisted with sweat and grime. His arms were bone, his skin wrinkled and stretched over stubs and grasping fingers. In one hand he held a scepter, in the other a beating heart.

The throne room doors opened. A knight walked into the hall.

The Blind King smiled.

“My son,” his old voice rasped, echoing through the hall.

The knight removed a silver helmet. Golden hair spilled over his shoulders, long and shimmering and young. Sharp features cut his gleaming skin, and one eye, brilliant blue, shone in the hall’s murky light. Blood leaked from a hole where the other should be.

Smoke rose up from the city outside: a city burning, failing, and dying.

“Father,” the knight approached the throne. “I have returned.”

“So you have,” the old king said. “You have seen the world’s evil and returned. Oh, what a proud man I am.”

“Not without cost,” the knight replied. He wiped away the blood from the pooling hole.

“No man sees chaos and returns unscarred,” the old king smiled. “Yet return you have, and that is more than many can say.”

“I have a gift for you,” the knight said.

“Ah…” the king mumbled.

The knight moved forward. He extended a metal gauntlet, the bloodied leather soaked in blotches of sticky dark globs. He held out an eye. His own bloodied eye. Veins spiraled out from behind the blue gem.

“You would give this to me?” the king asked.

“That you might see the world again,” the knight said.

“My boy, I have not seen for an age. That is not the way of us, for we have seen too much before.”

The king set the beating heart on the arm of the throne. He lay the scepter at his feet, and cupped the eye in both hands.

“Yet perhaps—though, are you sure? A day may come when you need see with both eyes clear.”

“Your wisdom and council may account for it,” the knight said. “For I am young and able, yet the kingdom and its pillars are that which you built. Let us work together to restore order, for the foundations you laid are not nothing. The pillars you chose are not nothing.”

“Yet the people burn them,” the old king said. “They see only age. Still…”

Then the Blind King took the eye between his finger and a crusted thumb, lined with dark stained blotches and long, chipped nails. He forced the thing inside of his own empty socket.

The eye spun wildly. It changed to bloodshot, then to grey, then settled to blue.

The king looked out on his son.

“My boy,” the king smiled.

The knight smiled back.

“We are needed, father,” the knight said. “My youth and your age. I will show you what it has become, and you must change once it has been seen. With your eye and mine, we will bring the future.”

“Ah, my boy,” the old king smiled. His wrinkled cheeks nearly tore with the motion.

The palace doors burst open. A hundred men surged into the room. Spears and torches and knives and fire stormed into the king’s old hall. They shouted and yelled and spit and stampeded. They surrounded the old king, and the knight was lost in the crowd.

“You mad old fool!” the people shouted. “You dusty relic! You ancient, useless tool! What use have we for your laws? What wisdom have you left? What you preach is past and dead. What you have to give is worthless. Give up your scepter, take your hands from our heart, for you do not and cannot know it! The old is dead, and the new will rise. It is our time to shape the world.”

The old king rose and panned his eye across the people. He stepped down from his throne and into the crowd.

“My people,” he said, and his old voice bellowed. “My kinsman, my children, my flock. You have set fire to our kingdom and dragged down our statues. I ask you: why?”

“To hell with those statues!” the people shouted. “They revere what we revile!”

“To revere is an action, one a statue cannot enact. To honor is an action, which a statue cannot perform. You the people perform, and what you have performed is destruction.”

“And destruction is change,” the people shouted, with their pitchforks and passion and flames. “It is time to change!”

“And so it is,” the old king said. “And so it must. And I cannot, for I am old—this I tell you is true. But what of the laws set forth in my youth? What of the foundations I laid in years past? Have I not laid you cobblestone? Have I not set you good laws?”

“That was the past, and this is now!” the people clamored and cried. “The world has moved on without you!”

“And so it has, this I admit,” the old king said aloud. “And blind frailty took me. I am old, and ancient, and decrepit, and I cannot be rewritten, for I have been forged and reforged. Yet have I no wisdom to give you? Would you tear down the pillars to build upon the roof? What I have set for you is good, at its heart. The bricks I lay for you are good, at their heart. And some must go, but some may stay: I ask you, must you raze the kingdom all to ash to build it higher? No, say I! Keep the useful, abandon the wretched. Use your eyes to discern the two!”

“You and your words are wretched, this we believe,” the people said. Then they tore the old king into pieces. They ripped him limb from limb, tore his head from his body, and left the blue eye in its socket where it lay.

Then they turned to the knight, standing saddened in the room.

“Hooray!” they cried. “Now the old king is dead, and you may lead us in his stead! Long live the hero prince! Long live evil’s bane!”

And the knight looked on mournfully at his father’s corpse.

“And why do you wish for me to lead you?” he asked. “Why me and not my father, from who I was born? From whose teachings I learned?”

“That old relic was of the past, but you now are our future!” the people cried.

“But I am from him, and his mind,” the knight said. “That which I know was taught to me by him. That which is my foundation are the bricks that he once laid. How am I different from he? Why would you turn to me, yet slay him so?”

“Oh, you think too long and hard, Hero Prince,” the people said, and kicked the old king’s skull. “You are young, and you know our hearts. You see with our eyes, you hear with our ears. Surely you can build a better kingdom, if we hand to you the keys!”

And the knight looked on saddened, saddened still. He looked at his old father, and the eye that once was his. He looked to the scepter, and the still beating heart, and the mahogany throne.

“There was wisdom in his soul,” the prince said. “He could not change, perhaps. But what he knew, some of it was good.”

“Oh, we have no need for that,” the people said.

And the prince took his seat on the old mahogany throne, with one eye and a bloody hole in his head. He picked up the heart and the scepter, and the people cheered. All around them the city burned to ashes and cinders, the embers of the Old Kingdom, so ancient and obsolete. Surely the next kingdom will be better, built by those who have torn down the old pillars, and who praise the son of a King they despised.