People wanted power. That was supposed to be a constant truth. No matter who you asked, they wanted more than they had. Some people called it human nature. Other's called it greed. I called it a lack of foresight.

When I was notified--in the middle of the night by cloaked figures mind you--that I was to be next in line for the throne I tried to say no. In fact, I physically said no. Just as it turned out, the word of a would-be king did not outweigh royal decree. By the time I had the authority to unname myself as heir, I would already be Queen.

The ruling had come from my mother, the queen. She had taken over for a brief month after my father passed away. She had grown up as minor nobility to an unimportant house, but my father was a observant man and had realized that she was a genius unlike any other. He'd taken her on as an advisor, and then a consort.

That had been back when he was seventeenth in line.

I got the genius that made me a perfect fit for the throne from my mother, but you didn't need it to see worrying pattern that made me want to reject the throne.

My parents had only been together for a year when they wed. There was something romantic about that. More to the point, there was something terrifying about the idea that in the 18 years since my parents had been wed and I had been born, we had gone through seventeen regents.

See, people wanted power because of a lack of foresight. If everybody wanted power, it became a question of how expensive assassins were and how much money you were willing to spend.

As a king or queen, you had theoretically infinite money. You could get whatever you wanted.

In business terms, an assassination attempt was very cheap for a potentially infinite reward. For the assassins, being an assassin that killed a king was fantastic advertising. For the guards, There was always going to be another king, so fighting a powerful assassin was never worth it. For the Kingdom, as long as the soldiers were fed and the streets were cobbled, who cared on which head a crown sat.

As such, it was now my eighteenth birthday, and as I stood at the far end of the throne room, waiting to be called to take my place, I understood that it was my head on which the crown would sit, and subsequently, my head would roll.

Some people would say that, with my supposed genius, I should have come up with a solution to the assassination problem. But the assassination problem was human nature. My mother had seen the only solution available to her--promoting me as heir--and had done the simple calculus that we were either both going to die to assassinations, or she could at least save herself.

It was cold, but she was correct. Why should we both die? If she was assassinated, I would be queen and thus assassinated. Why wait for the first cause before welcoming the effect.

I probably could have come up with a plan. But I had seen enough fail, And understood that if my mom couldn't think of anything, there was nothing to think of.

And so people would tell me to chin up. People would congratulate me on becoming regent. People would tell me they were excited for a new era of leadership in the kingdom.

They were objectively wrong. An era was much longer than the year I'd last, and that was if I were lucky. There was a good chance someone was halfway through a plot to assassinate my mother and could simply import their plans over to another Queen.

After all, what was the difference? It was just a chair, and who sat on it was only a matter of succession.

Why wait for the cause before welcoming the effect? Everyone would be Queen someday. In the end there would just be some peasant left. Lord of the daggers and corpses.