Guilty as Charged

The King looked on from a snowy cliff;
A bony, shivering wretch with a memory he wished to forget.
His beaten face showed the circles and cutting lines time had worn,
And from his two decayed, lidless eyes he gazed upon that frozen city.
His silent heart had sunk somewhere off the coast of two dark, distant clouds,
Holding onto the hope that the Lord's sanctity would someday forgive him.

Spectators flocked to that snowy city like a pack of wild hounds,
And the pale King watched as the shadow of people creeped forward.
Black rings of smoke hazed above their wicked, torch-reflecting eyes,
And their murderous cries hung in the air like frozen mist.
No nerves filled their veins, but instead the neglect for a human life,
And the necessity to satisfy a primordial instinct.

In the distance, a stony eyed Prince made his way toward the growing mass,
Accompanied by the brutal stares and hateful words he deserved.
He was a convicted killer not at all fit to be of the royal family,
Whose death sentence was undoubtedly justified by the glimmering Blade ahead.
The Prince had made his move eighteen years ago and finally the day had come,
When the Guillotine would fulfill his dead brother's final request.

The King's old eyes nervously danced around the figure he knew to be his son;
Haunting memoirs of that infamous night eighteen years ago still lurked in his mind.
The anger, the subtlety, and the final words of hate with which he banished his son forever,
But how could a father redeem any man who had violated the very contents of the human heart?
A son that had passed the pestilence of Murder along to his elder brother,
For the sole purpose that he would someday grace his father's throne?

The Prince trudged his way past those hateful cries and icy streets,
In shell shocked derangement alongside belligerent executioners.
His once youthful gait was now a gimp,
And the premature signs of gray hairs were already infesting that youthful head.
His formative years somehow skipped, forgotten, and changed by a fatal error,
That had left a scar so deep no words or actions could ever mend.

A snowy radiance brought the Prince's face into a strange light,
Reflecting the dark pupils and yet the undertones of a misunderstood sublimity.
The Prince gazed upon his vivid memories of that fateful night;
He thought it strange that his father had refused to speak to him all that time,
And by doing so had ignored the truth; now buried under years of silence.
But how could his father know that he had in fact saved his very life?

The Prince remembered the shattering sounds of that night,
When the King awoke to see his eldest son reduced to a heap of mangled bones.
He asked no questions, but instead pointed his bony finger at the Prince,
Who ironically held the dagger that had saved his life.
And now the king eighteen years later still pointed that same bony finger,
Asking no questions and looking no further for the truth than he had ever done.

The vivid memories blazed into the Prince's mind;
All his thoughts, dreams, and aspirations evaporating in a single instant,
When he plunged the dagger into his brother's traitorous back;
A decision that ultimately would spare his own father's life,
All for a heartless sibling that couldn't escape the lust of power.
But would the King ever know it was really the eldest who wanted the throne?

High above on the cliff, questions whipped across the King's conflicted mind like delirium,
Splitting his head wide open with the lurid memories of his eldest son's final words.
Those final gasping breaths with which the son used to make his father swear,
That the younger brother would be held accountable for an undeniable fratricide.
And to think it would all come down to this hour, this moment in time,
When that forsaken son would be walking toward the Guillotine.

Karma retreated one last time and the Prince stepped up to meet his destiny.
A freezing fear gripped him for the first time and his father for the last.
The King's heart in a state of disrepair that he had unknowingly brought upon himself;
His life entangled by his own blindless reality,
And as a result let the dynasty his father and his father had forged,
Crumble to the ground like a house of cards in the wind.

The executioner readied the Prince's head under that gleaming instrument,
And the Prince abstained one last time from his father's gaze.
A gaze so vivid yet as distant as a lucid dream that had never even occurred.
The man in black cut the finite hand of that huge ebony rope,
And the doomsday clock struck the Prince's final hour;
His head rattled off into some small forgotten garrett.

The King stared up at the darkening swirls of black chaos,
And a single drop of water landed under the shadow of his eye.
He thought of his two sons and the dynasty that had risen just as fast as it had fallen.
The King swiped the drop of water from his one dying eye,
And he peered down into the lifeless face of that son that he gave no chance and wondered,
If maybe things could have been different.