The Emperor of Solitude

There was no room for him in the empire. He hardly spoke. Some thought he was mad, some thought he was snobbish. He wasn’t a skillful soldier anyways. He was summoned by the royal court and found guilty for not helping a fellow soldier in a war. His crime was not serious, but the intent of the court and the indifference of the people were unyielding and he was ostracized and imprisoned; a merciless, yet a relatively harmless, sentence.

Its been ten years now. The grueling sun and the luminescent moon, day after day, are making the prisoner older by a day. His cell lies in the middle of nowhere, guarded by no one, visited by the diverse fauna of the plateau and fenced by the dry fauna.

Hunger, has the prisoner never faced for he befriended the birds who dropped him eatables. Sleep is as sound as it can get. He hardly speaks for there is no human around. The language of other living beings around him is as alien as colors to a blind. But the love among them is as unadulterated as milk in cows’ glands.

The animals found solace in the prisoner’s shadow. It was as if he touched them, caressed them. They sat in his shadow, in honest turns, until the sun called it a day; gazed at him in the moonlight. His soul touched them through his shadows and his aura; while he just laid there, endlessly thinking. Contemplating things known only to him. He is not conspiring against anyone, for he is already in a locked up cell; to which he is so used to that he embraces life imprisonment in it. He does not dwell on the past deeds or misdeeds, nor does he chalk out the future. He thinks, in the present, about the happiness he can accumulate. He doesn’t need tangible things for happiness, for if the soul is happy he is happy.

In the middle of nowhere, the unusual, incomprehensible contentment and bliss of his leaks out if him and emanates from his cell all around. The living creatures near him cherish it and worship him for it. They view him as an angel, their king, their master. He is the emperor of solitude.

The emperor of solitude can live only in imprisonment, the depths of which wouldn’t be understood by anyone. Ones who try to understand it, or try to mend his ways, would free him from his cell. This will cause suffocate him, torture him, like a tunnel would do to a claustrophobic. The emperor will become mad and will have to be ostracized again.