The Tyranny of King Chaturanga

In this way, nearly a millennium passed. As peace was maintained for a long time, the will of the kingdom began to soften and its founding history became only the stuff of legend. Gods, the demon realm, the sacrifice of ancient heroes... All of these facts of history became like the story of a distant dream.

As outside crises faded, kings could neglect state affairs to a certain extent with the kingdom still maintaining normalcy, and the royal family of Lykeion started having descendants who were fit to be called degenerates. After successive degenerate generations, the royal family’s wealth was squandered, shaking the foundations of the kingdom’s finances. Among these, the monarch who brought the most ruin to the kingdom was the 79th king, Chaturanga.

In love with the pleasures of wine and the flesh from the time he was a prince, Chaturanga, once he ascended the throne, ruled only by his personal feelings. He exhausted the royal treasury early in order to provide extravagantly for his barbarian concubine, Medes, with whom he was deeply enamored. Lacking money, even after selling the inherited property of his forebears, Chaturanga filled his storehouse by levying brutal taxes on his people and even robbed the riches of their savings in the royal bank by framing them with false crimes.

Still, because of his strong authority, none dared speak against his unreasonableness, and the palace was filled only with sycophants. The overseers were busy fulfilling their selfish desires and unable to properly manage the affairs of the state, and so the kingdom’s economy fell to ruin. Social discipline began to falter as the people fell again into poverty, and pillaging became frequent. Almost as if to curse this corrupt kingdom, it was at this time that there was an earthquake which caused buildings to collapse and dormant volcanoes to again spit fire. The kingdom’s sacred tree, which had survived from the times of the ancient kings, was struck by lightning and burned, and the demons, who had disappeared for over a millennium, were rumored to have reappeared on the continent.