Story #28: The Hands that Rock the Horse

Story #28: The Hands that Rock the Horse A noble prince upon a brilliant steed, charging valiantly into the fray of glory with a saber held high onto the heavens. It was the thing that legends were made of; bards would sing songs of his bravery, while artists made him their muse for timeless murals to adorn the walls of chapels. That was how it ought to be. That was the exact path that the fair prince had taken at every turn. He'd trained his mind, body, and soul to one day take the crown and go down into the halls of myth as a great king. He'd known that being heir to the crown was like having a target painted on his back, and he had thought that he'd done enough to defend himself from those that'd see him fall. Defense like that was to protect him from a knife in his back, but it had done nothing to protect him from a drink in his hand. One stalwart sip had been enough to seal his fate. His wine had been tainted by the hands of the royal alchemist, but it was not a poison that intended to kill him. No, he would have to stay living and watch the second in line to the crown be the one to become king. Watching this atrocity of justice would be from a much lower vantage point though. The prince, the morning after his wine, would awake to find himself rapidly losing his age. Months melted away by the hour, and the treacherous alchemist herself was tasked with curing this ailment. The young woman put on a good show of diagnosis and attempted aid, but it was but a farce. She lied about the origin of this degeneration, blaming the prince sharing a night with a succubus, and that this was clearly a curse. At no point did she concede that this might be foul play from another potential heir, nor did she consider that this condition could originate from a glass flask. The prince found himself losing his puberty, and it was only the next morning that he was but a child. He found himself having to wear clothes from years ago, and even they would become looser and looser throughout the day. The prince was truly understanding what it meant to be afraid for the first time in his pampered life; at this rate that he was reverting, would he simply blink out of existence in another day? Yesterday he had been the clear heir to the throne, but now such a crown would indeed be much too heavy for such a dainty head; both figuratively and literally. The prince was now the smallest of his brothers, and with no cure in sight, it was looking like his birthright would be stripped from him. His existential terror of fading away would soon be squashed, but that did little to alleviate his inner turmoil; he stopped shrinking at the size of a toddler, and little did he know that this would be the size that he'd remain. He wouldn't be pushed any further back, but he'd also not be able to grow past this point; his fate was this stagnant state of infancy. With this shift in form, also came a shift in his physical capabilities. The most clear cut example of this was an inability to control his bodily functions, which of course meant his most trusted servants were now on diaper duty, instead of handling the needs of a philandering lush, they had to dirty their hands with an emotionally volatile toddler. Since this cursed state supposedly came from flirting with the devil's maidens, it was kept an internal secret. The prince was said to be married off to a princess of a distant land, where he was to become king, and in his place, the next oldest of his brothers would step up to the task on the homefront. In actuality, the prince was relegated to a royal nursery, and treated in the manner that he appeared. He'd made his complaints known, but they'd been ignored. The image of the royal family was more important than the ego of a prince, who now waddled around in a cloth diaper that was often packed with his own dung. His existence would be ignored by the public, since on the face of it, he was no longer even considered a prince to the throne. He was just a baby, thought to be a child of a servant or advisor. Years of this erasure, and this infantile treatment, and the prince began to adopt the role that had been foisted upon him. His capacity for reasoning, or even speech, began to degrade toward a point that was consistent with how he appeared. After a decade of this, the king would finally pass on, and the eldest prince would be set to take the throne. The morning before the ceremony, this prince would go off to the royal nursery, to visit his 'older' brother. The original heir was set upon an ornate rocking horse, with a drooly pacifier between his lips and a very thick stack of diapers on between his legs. If an adult thought could still pass through his head, then he didn't betray any evidence of it. He'd been conditioned by the years to become this, and there didn't appear to be any chance for coming back from it. The other prince couldn't help but smile at the sight, not for how innocent it appeared, but for how easily this had all been put into place for him. He'd long been having an 'unprofessional' relationship with the royal alchemist, and it hadn't been difficult to convince her that he would make a better king than his older brother; it had been even easier when he had tempted her with the position of being his queen. Fratricide would have been too obvious, and doing things in an unconventional manner had allowed the matter to be more neatly swept under the rug. A poisoned prince would have spurred countless years of investigation and palace intrigue, but one who had been transformed? The royal family tripped over themselves to cover it up. As the newfound king ruminated on his dirty deed, the one who he had stolen the throne from was in the middle of a dirty deed of a different sort. The toddler gripped tightly at the handles of the rocking horse and began to grunt from beneath his pacifier; a cacophony of rude, undignified noises began to orchestrate within the confines of his plush padding and an excess of drool began to seep past his pacifier, to trail down his chin and onto his bare chest. "Worry not, brother. As your new king, I intend to make sure that you continue to live in comfort. I'm sure you can't really understand what I'm saying...Not by this point, but...I should confess that this was a plot of my own machinations. You can take some solace in the knowledge that you'll likely outlive us all, even if it is as...This." The small boy paid his brother no mind, likely not even recognizing who exactly he was supposed to be, or what he was trying to explain. The only matter of importance was the task at hand, and the wonderfully squishy way the seat of his diaper was beginning to feel. "...Yes, I'm sure that you're much too busy for me. I'll take my leave and allow you some privacy in your befouling; I do have a ceremony to prepare for. The next time you see me, I'll be king." The man began to take his leave from the nursery, while the tot was finishing filling his diaper with a royal-sized pile. The little boy sat back down fully, allowing the steaming mush to bubble underneath him, and happily went back to rocking on the horse. There'd be no tapestry or songs of his legend; there would only be an eternal infancy of simple pleasures, fit not for a king, but a toddler.