Breathe
By Romanov Heiress
In a remote kingdom, where the sun kisses the mountains at dawn and the breezes caress the fields at dusk, there reigned with disdain a monarch, whose majesty in age contrasted with the decrepitude of his ideals. He was a king who stood like a marble column in a palace of mirrors, a ruler whose once keen eyes were now clouded by a veil of egomania and disdain for the cries of his people.
One morning, upon awakening, the king was met with an unexpected surprise: a grotesque infectious slime had nested in his face, just below his nose. The pus, like an affront to his authority, challenged his countenance. He considered, in his delirium of grandeur, that perhaps it was a ruse of his adversaries, an incantation to strip him of his power.
"What is this?" he exclaimed, as he felt his face, in a vain attempt to understand the nature of his distress.
A royal physician was immediately summoned. This one, a man with a grim face and servile gesture, observed the mud attentively, before issuing his diagnosis.
"My lord, this is a strong skin condition," said the doctor in a reverential voice.
The king, blinded by arrogance, listened attentively to the words of the doctor, who assured him that the best way to cure his illness would be to use natural remedies, herbal infusions and ointments prepared according to ancient recipes, so that he could set an example to his people.
"It is the medicine of our ancestors! The real medicine!" the doctor proclaimed, with a mixture of conviction and adulation. "With this, you will prove to your people that we do not need the gimmicks of modern medicine, nor hospitals, nor self-interested doctors who come to poison us with their potions."
The king, fearful of losing further control over his kingdom, nodded solemnly. He ordered all healing rituals to be carried out according to the ancestral teachings, while he himself surrendered to the care of the royal physician.
And so, in a spectacle worthy of farce, the king submitted to the treatment, while his subjects, with incredulous eyes and empty stomachs, watched from a distance. The spectacle of the monarch, smeared with ointments and wrapped in aromatic herbs, became a parody of reality, a satire of the arrogance and indifference of power.
And while the king clung to his throne, trying to keep the demons of disease and popular dissatisfaction at bay, the people sighed with resignation, aware that in that kingdom, the real disease lay not in the skin of the monarch, but in the heart of a system that prioritizes vanity over truth, opulence over need, and ignorance over the welfare of its citizens.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
Comments ()