For newlywrittenbooks - 875 words was too long to comment so I'll post it here.
'Long live the King!' the ecstatic crowds shouted as the crown was placed on the head of the former Prince of Wales, now inheritor of the throne. Monarchy now ruled the land, the ancient system now rightfully restored after a few centuries' anomaly. Technology had transformed the lives of the citizens. Wars had started and finished. Even empires had fallen.
Yet, as always, the British Crown remained. And King George the 12th surveyed his kingdom, real not just symbolic power restored at last.
Outside the Palace walls, thousands of George's subjects were dying of bubonic plague. Like the power of Monarchy itself, man's old enemy was an archaic relic that had never truly vanished, now resurgent after antibiotic resistance, recession and war had depleted humanity's ability to cope.
It didn't matter to George, though.
He'd never even seen a rat in his life.
He wasn't even sure he could identify one from the photos.
And did it matter anyway? The fearsome disease carried by Homo sapiens' only real competitor in intelligence, cunning and cruelty was useful in thinning the herd, or so his advisers were always telling him.
He had no reason not to believe them. Father had trusted them. And Father was always right.
He had governed the United Kingdom and all her dominions well. He had restored the Throne to its rightful place, no longer mere figureheads or characters in a soap opera but unquestioned, absolute Leadership, there by a divine right to rule, answerable only to God.
So the new King retired to his bedchamber. He had such a task ahead of him, but he had no doubt he would complete it.
Three metres below his feet, for that was how far anyone was still ever away, another King took up his own mantle. But unlike pampered George, this one was a warrior. He accompanied his troops into battle whereas George moved between a series of stately homes and palaces and seldom spoke to a commoner who had been thoroughly vetted. This King stalked the sewers under his feet and the spaces in between the walls. His kind never got sick from this new variant. Not through design - they were not monsters - but by accident, the plague and its devastation had made him, not the scion of the privileged, parasitic family occupying the palace, the country's real ruler.
He ascended the fatberg that had become his throne, pulled his shiny pink tail around him and cloaked himself in a sheet of gold plastic salvaged from a rubbish dump and decorated intricately, fit for a King himself. His teeming hordes of followers stood to rapt attention.
One of his attendants took a crown and placed it on his head.
'Long live the King!' the attendant shouted, his high pitched voice echoing throughout the tunnel.
'Long live the King!' thousands of rats squeaked, hanging on his every word.
'The King is dead, long live the King,' the rat squeaked, looking around him at the dark tunnel, the clothes he wore saved from the remnants of a civilisation, of a species that was dying, had already died, and didn't know it.
'Humanity has failed, look around you,' the King said, waving his tail around to squeaks and gleeful cries of agreement. The poison, traps and other cruel methods humans had tried to wipe them out with only honing Darwinian selection until now his species produced geniuses to rival Einstein or Beethoven.
'They've lost,' he said, to cheers and applause. 'Tonight, the palace has fallen, the royal line is no more. As with everything about these hairless monkeys, they just don't know it.'
In his bedchamber, George 12th answered correspondence from his adoring fans. The letters, while there were fewer and fewer of them these days, presented him were always of the most sycophantic kind, never with a hint of privation or suffering. He prided himself on personally replying to them all, a tradition Father had started. It was the least they could do for their grateful people.
It was the only thing they did.
Literacy for the common man and woman now a distant thing of the past, George didn't have to so much as sign his name before, he believed, the adoring peasant would treasure this memento of Royalty, let it occupy pride of place in their hovel.
After he had given the letters to his assistant, he opened the heavily censored internet on his phone; he was one of the few people in the kingdom important or wealthy enough to own one. The news contained nothing but messages of adulation and sycophancy on his coronation, photographs of happy, smiling, well fed villagers full of joy at this momentous event.
George smiled, knowing his subjects adored him. His advisers would never lie to him. He trusted their every word. He read about the thousands of tributes in his honour, grateful to each and every one.
He didn't see the member of the other Royal Guard creeping into his room, climbing through an unseen hole not even the Palace's wealth could patch up. He lovingly prepared his first parliamentary speech as the rat scuttled across the carpet.
'The King is dead,' it said, before it sank its teeth into his leg. 'Long live the King.'
