🕑 Added 2025-02-17 21:01:23 +0000 UTC
Story #188: The Prince of Poopies
(Content Tags: Fantasy setting, extreme degradation, braindrain, deposed king, dirty diapers, humiliation)
There he crawled around in the dirt, his mind having become as broken as his spirit. Noble vestments long stripped from his frail form, with all he now had to rely on was the bulky burlap nappy around his waist. His flawless flesh, descended from a heavenly bloodline, was now marred with the filth of the earthen soil.
His signature orange hair had become messy and matted; his emerald eyes had dulled of their cruel wit. No more would his mouth order poor souls to wallow in shame in the stocks, and it wasn't all that clear that he could say much at all; his drooly lips were slackened in a stupor, his maw a mishmash of lost teeth.
The prissy perfume that had once wafted from his body had been replaced by the smell of sweat, urine, and dung. It had become a fitting scent for the forlorn fascist that had once gripped the reigns of power. No longer did he dine on banquets so decadent and bountiful that they could feed the starving peasants for a week; no, his palate had lost such refinement, and now he more often ate bugs or dirt.
In totality, he had become every bit as ugly on the outside as he was on the inside. He deserved every last bit of it and more. He had been living proof that a child's cruelty could exceed that of an adult.
Prince Luka. Or rather, 'Holy Emperor Luka', as he'd taken on in his ascent to the throne, had been the most destructive ruler in their kingdom's history, and in an absurdly short period. He'd taken the throne at eight, and by ten, he'd already set forth the conditions to his own downfall at the hands of an angry populace.
There had been no other choice but to depose the despot; the little brat's whims had continued to become more reckless and heartless, and they had likely only been a few weeks away from a complete implosion of everything they knew. If they hadn't tossed his tiny tush from the throne, then their kingdom would have laid in absolute ruin.
In his brief rule, he had worsened the quality of life for everyone by dramatic quotients: people were starving, people were getting sick, trade agreements had been shredded by the boy's lack of diplomacy, and wars with various other kingdoms had been imminent on the horizon.
Luka's impulsive nature, mixed with a sadism that had been nurtured by a superiority complex, had made for an altogether unfit ruler. His father, the late King Leoni, had himself been a benevolent ruler; one who thought that a king was nothing without his subjects, and who did everything he could to improve things for all who lived in the realm of his influence.
His death, which had seemingly been natural at the time, had caused a great mourning among those who'd been buoyed by his compassion. Luka had been less widely reviled at that time; he had shown his colors a few times in public, especially with the glee he seemed to get from enacting 'punishments' on the similarly aged boys of the kingdom, but his demeanor had been brushed off as a matter of childhood.
Even if his personality had gotten a pass back then, the more pressing concern had been his lack of experience; Luka's father had himself become king in his thirties, after living a life where he dwelled on concerns of the 'little people', so he'd had a lot of time to understand the nuances of how one needed to govern. The small solace had been that Luka would have his father's advisor to help guide his tiny hands, and in that way, it was expected that there would be an unbroken continuum in the prosperity of their little slice of heaven.
That would not end up being the case, and later facts would paint the picture that the advisor, Torvald, had himself been complicit in the king's untimely demise. The ungrateful wretch had poisoned the king, with the idea to groom the heir to becoming his figurehead. While Torvald had always been seen as an austere man, his capacity for wickedness had never been considered, and so it had come as another shock to the kingdom to learn of the conspiracy that he had sowed.
But Torvald would reap the whirlwind before his deeds ever came to light. The cherubic ginger, whom he had wished to play the puppet master to, had seen the man as outliving his usefulness.
That had been within the first year of his rule. Luka had been allowed to indulge every fancy that had popped into his degenerate little mind, and Torvald had kept him placated by feeding his desires, but there had come a point where Torvald had been left with no choice but to deny a request. Pilfering the coffers for his own greed had been fine, and so had been all the oppressive decrees, and even the wanton tyranny over the people, but Luka had been about to cross the line.
Like a child playing soldier, Luka had wanted to needlessly invade a kingdom that offered no reason to; it would have been a boondoggle that would have cost countless lives, years of tax revenue, and would have soured every current diplomatic relationship that their own kingdom had. As reward, they would have inherited a poorer nation with little resources and a populace that would never fully submit.
The whim had been purely egotistical as well. The ruler of the targeted nation had been condescending to him during a meeting of allied kingdoms, where Luka had honestly deserved to be treated like the petulant child he was. He'd been compared to an infant still in nappies, cleverly mocked in that fashion, and his pride had been injured.
Luka had said yes, Torvald had said no, and the execution had been called upon by the next day.
It had been a public affair, which had been preceded by a humiliating walk through the city square, and Luka hadn't even bothered to formulate a good-sounding excuse for why he'd signed the man's death warrant. For supporters of the previous king, this had been a grim day, as they saw the final shard of the prior kingdom being shattered upon a stone of darkness.
Without the barest of floodgates to stop the boy's reckless rule, the despair of the people would escalate in tandem with Luka's craven behavior. Laws became more petty and senseless, public flogging and humiliation became a daily spectacle, and resources were being bled dry. Anyone who dared to speak out was silenced, and the castle was filled with unquestioning loyalists who would carry out whatever the king desired.
With the help of the castle's unscrupulous alchemist, the boy had also deigned to return to an era of enslavement; by feeding prisoners a bitter concoction of herbs and fungi, Luka could destroy the minds of dissenters and turn their bodies into a simple-minded workforce that would labor endlessly for him. A small dose would take away their autonomy, while a larger one would leave them on par with the wit of a young babe.
It had multifaceted use cases for an immature tyrant, and he wasted no time in going after his worst detractors. One such voice, who had managed to avoid the wrath of the king for longer than most, was a prominent scholar who had once been an asset to the former king: Cyrus the Wise.
Cyrus wrote a scathing thesis about Luka's reign, where he laid out every way that the little boy had failed to live up to the expectations that his father had set. He criticized the immaturity and thoughtlessness that Luka had shown, and he questioned the legitimacy of the boy's rule.
It was representative of what the rest of the kingdom already thought, but were too afraid to vocalize. Cyrus had seemed to genuinely believe that there wouldn't be reprisals for the harsh words he'd written; he thought that his arguments would help the prince see the error of his ways.
Cyrus was first to be punished by the mind-erasing brew. He was taken from his home, brought to the castle, and forced to imbibe an excessive dosage of the same wretched swill that had turned prisoners into slaves. Possibly the greatest intellectual in the kingdom, and Luka callously transformed him into a drooling simpleton who couldn't string a proper sentence together or control the activity of his own bowels.
Cyrus was marched through the town square, like many before him, but he was the first of several to do so as a mindless beast in nothing but an oversized nappy. Pearls of slobber covered his chest, bulbous bubbles of snot came from his nostrils, and trumpets of desecration sounded off in the back of his dingy nappy.
The people of the kingdom had to watch in horror as it was made apparent that the shining jewel of their academic system had been dulled, that he was made into a pitiful fool that could be outsmarted by the average child. Shock enveloped the audience as he stumbled around on his shaky footing, his mouth hanging open, and then he bent his knees to fill his nappy with putrid dung.
Cyrus was the first, but hardly the last, who would meet such a fate. Luka had been amused by the degrading display, and thus this cruel punishment became a primary tool in his arsenal.
The next big name to meet such a fate was an anonymous satirist who penned under the pseudonym of Zarik, a reference to an old fable about a jester that didn't hold his tongue in front of his lord. Illustrations began to pop up around the kingdom, depicting Luka as a hapless, infantile ruler; he was drawn in an unflattering way that exaggerated his youth and lack of impulse control, clad in a soiled nappy and welding a rattle in lieu of a scepter.
These illustrations became more frequent and more debasing over the weeks that they were printed, and they became a beloved amusement of a people that had lost any faith that their child king was a trustworthy ruler. The captions became common jokes in pubs and classrooms alike, with Luka being the punchline.
Luke was furious, of course, but the satirist remained anonymous long enough to destroy whatever remnants of an image that the boy once had. It was only by dumb luck that the culprit was eventually brought to justice, whenever a guard had caught him hanging up his most recent poster in the middle of the night.
The one responsible had been a young, talented artist from the slums. The little boy, only a couple of years older than Luka himself, had been the one to undermine the king's rule, and in a way that had been more effective than the thesis that Cyrus had presented.
Luka had offered him one chance for redemption. He ordered the boy to again make an illustration of him, but to instead craft one that showed his power and wit. Luka wanted propaganda that would show him more positively, to derail the degraded image that the previous pictures had bestowed.
The satirist agreed, and the plan was to unveil a mural at Luka's tenth birthday. In his naivete, Luka wanted the mural to remain unseen until the party; the tiny tyrant had believed that Zarik would acquiesce to his will, and that there was no room for betrayal.
When the moment came, and the mural was unveiled in front of the esteemed guests of the party, it was nothing like Luka had demanded.
It had taken months to paint, and the technical skill was unmatched, but the depiction was as far from dignified as possible. In the painting, Luka was shown to be an imbecile in a filthy, bulging nappy; drool dribbling from his lips, pudgy tummy distended ever so slightly over the front of the nappy, and with his tiny hands using dung from his own lumpy nappy to scrawl a 'decree' on parchment.
It was worse than everything else that the satirist had done in the past, and Luka was humiliated at his own party. Enraged by the disobedience and heresy toward his eminence, he had the satirist again imprisoned, and so forth came the beginning of the end.
Much like Cyrus the Wise, Zarik was to be publicly humiliated for his transgressions against the crown. He was dragged to the same place Cyrus had been, but with his mind still intact, and he was put in the pillory while swaddled in nothing but a nappy. He was slowly given the same potion of mindlessness, so that his intelligence would unravel seam by seam, until he was drooling and defecating on himself.
The decree came down that anyone who dared to insult the king would meet the same humiliating fate, and that they would become slaves who worked endlessly to appease the crown.
It wasn't much longer after that, for when the coup would begin. The loyalists that he had surrounded himself with had finally had enough of walking on eggshells around him, and the smarter of them could see the writing on the wall for what would soon happen to the kingdom with Luka at the helm.
So just like the ones he had publicly humiliated, Luka was marched off to the town square in shackles and a nappy, now resembling the satirical posters that he'd been so upset over. His fury and narcissism were present all throughout, with not a drop of introspection to cleanse his wickedness.
So he was put in the pillory, head and hands secured, and his padded tushy jutting out from his bent over posture. The people threw tomatoes at his nappy-clad rump, splattering the mushy things against his seat as they pelted him.
Much like Zarik, he was slowly forced to imbibe the same dreadful elixir, and thus his brain gradually began to become mushy. He panicked and threatened everyone in the square, but they all knew that his words were impotent; the reign of Luka was officially over, and nothing signaled that better than the moment that he first stooled upon himself in the pillory.
Flatulence had sputtered wetly and grossly against the bulwark of his nappy's backside, and the former king was left grunting and groaning as the first trickle of drool escaped his lips. His backside was covered in tomatoes, but bits began to be shaken loose from the wild rumbling of his uncontrollable gas.
With clenched teeth and rosy cheeks, the once powerful ruler was lowered to the status of an infant. His bowels were no longer listening to him, and he would never be in charge of them or any subjects ever again. A foul crackling came from the thick cloth padding and an enormous solid turd slithered out like a great serpent.
Among the crowd was the royal portrait artist, who had previously been charged with making Luka look better than he was, under threat of meeting the same punishment as Zarik, but now he was free to give a final portrait to their worst ever ruler. He painted the details of Luka's soiling with the finest brush in his arsenal, assuring future generations knew how things had ended for the mad king.
Luka was kept in the pillory, helplessly pushing logs into his nappy, for several days without changing. He was made to watch as a new king was crowned, based on a far more democratic process than his bloodline would have ever allowed. He kept just enough of his mind to suffer the indignities of his usurping.
The new king decided that he wasn't to be executed. Luka was to be kept alive, but was to be banished to the farmlands on the edge of the kingdom; no longer a noble, nor even a real person, he was to be treated as little more than a barn animal. His broken mind wasn't much different than a beast, so it was a fitting end to his rule.
And now months later, there he was, having had no choice but to accept the lowly role. He crawled along the dirt, farting and making stool in a dirty burlap diaper, eating bugs like a lowly chimp, while a swarm of flies buzzed around his lumpy backside. His only contribution to the kingdom he once terrorized being the sacks of manure that he wore around his waist, which could fertilize the very earth he was relegated to.
However, as more secrets came to light about how badly he harmed the kingdom, it was only a matter of time before his punishment was worsened. He may find his next domain to rule upon in the muck pit beneath the castle.
Such would be fitting for who was now the 'prince of poopies'.
