And suddenly, the King’s scene changed.
He was a mother, screaming in fear as soldiers smashed through her door, in terror as her baby was snatched from their sleeping pallet, in pain as a soldier’s bronze gauntlet smashed her teeth as she tried to stop them, in anguish as she watched the sword above her baby rise and fall.
He was a father yelling with fear and rage, as he tried to shield his young son from advancing soldiers, striking the first with his fists and then feeling the hot stabbing of pain as the next thrust a sword into his side.
He was a small child, woken from a restless dream, running towards her mother, seeing the look of horror on her mothers face, but barely feeling the blow that caused everything to go black.
He was a grandfather, weeping as he washed blood from the stone hearth of a small house, weeping as he saw the small shape under a hastily pulled over blanket.
The King lived what his soldiers had done, over and over again, through the eyes of every one of the children, mothers, fathers, families, and onlookers in that small town. If he had been in a place where time still flowed, it would have taken a week, non-stop, from start to finish.
And then he came, sobbing and screaming, to a new reality. He was naked – yes, he had a body now – on cold, cold, white ground. He had never seen it, but he realised this was ice (he had once heard a traveller tell of how water could freeze into a clear, hard, solid, but he had never really believed it). The ice burned his feet, and a wind tore at his bare skin. He screamed with the cold, for fear, and for the memory of what he had just lived through. He looked down and saw a reflection of himself in the clear ice. His hair had gone completely white. ‘What has happened? What have I done?’ and he would have cried, but the tears froze in his eyes.