Like any ordinary man he roused from sleep and was doused into consciousness in the face of the penetrating heat of dawn.
Dabbing his eyes with the back of his hand from where he was sprawled on the royal bed, the reassuring sight of his plush balcony, spacious bedchamber and exotic furnitures greeted his eyes, all of which he usually took for granted, save for one special view right beside him. He turned to find the lithe form of his wife in her nightly dress sleeping peacefully.
He sighed satisfyingly.
It was said that the longevity of the kingdom was not necessarily assured on the battlefield or in the throne room but within the width of this bed on long, cold and passionate nights.
The great clock of the city bonged not long after—which he initially mistook for a ringing headache from being hungover—and he eventually reoriented himself with the knowledge that it soon would be time to receive supplicants in the throne room at the other side of the towering palace.
He yawned and stretched carefully to not disturb his dear wife, Queen Nia, in her sleep.
Part of his morning ritual was standing by his balcony that overlooked the city to take in the luxurious view. The kingdom of Sez appeared glossy this morning with the sun well over the horizon amply bathing the landscape of outspread steel towers and the disproportionate clusters of stone and mortar houses between in its radiant hue. All seemed well in his picturesque paradise and king Zladi beamed a regal smile.
And then he felt the need to pee, and a soft urge to feel himself. He did and didn’t. He felt his groin and didn’t feel himself. He chuckled in fearful surprise. Felt it again and again, still nothing. He groped beneath his robe for himself but was met with unsettlingly plain flesh. Taken aback, he held onto the rails before him as he swallowed the yell that would wake the rest of Sez if he let it out.
Was this some dream? The clouds looked dreamy enough, drifting slowly northward. The view below suddenly seemed grotesque as he pinpointed for the first time in a long while the banal activities of the poorest of his people going about their daily lives.
He turned to Queen Nia. She was still very much asleep. How could she? Who was she dreaming of till this troubling hour? She liked to have these fantasies where she dreamed of valiant knights doing duels. But war was long gone, he had told her, they were now in an era of peace where the solidification of their nascent kingdom through childbearing was what truly mattered.
Just when he was going to call her name, he caught the words in his throat as he decided to reassess himself once again. He groped and even untied his robe to check and he was still blank between his legs. The sun smote his face and everything didn’t feel so dreamlike anymore.
Where had he been? What had he done? Who had he spoken to? Who had he touched last? Last he recalled, he’d been frolicking at the courts yesterday evening, staggering into the night.
His eyes zeroed on his queen and he called to her at once. “Nia! Bloody wake up.”
Her body jerked to consciousness, rubbing at her eyes. “What’s happening, my king?”
“We’ve been robbed,” he said, walking into their bedchamber and frantically pacing the foot of the bed.
Instinctively, she was going to call for the guards. He stopped her, hesitant to explain things at first but then did. She didn’t believe him, so he asked her to come feel him for herself. He leaned towards her side of the bed and when he felt him, she gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. She started asking him the usual questions of who, when and what. He answered offhandedly, saying he’d already gone over that and got nothing.
Fully cast into the mold of her queendom, she laid out a power move. “You should have the heads of all and sundry who attended your court last night.”
He paused to consider. “You think so?”
“This is the work of black magic, my king. It cannot be allowed to go unpunished.” She was worked up about the situation, crawled the length of the bed and found her feet on the ground, next to his. Less than himself now, she knew he’d be needing every gesture of reassurance that his wife could muster.
“Say nothing of this to anyone.” He was tensed, and his voice terse. Then he walked off.

* * *

Later in the day after the king had received supplicants, all the while absentminded, he thought to call for a sudden meeting with his discreet council, then decided against it because he would not be able to bring himself to explain things.
So he sat on his throne, and without a phallus nor hope of a heir, reasoning things out. To his right was his jester and to his left his cupbearer. The jester he had ordered to shut up and the cupbearer to ceaselessly fill his goblet.
A man approached in a gray garb with scrolls rolled under his arm and an inkwell in the other hand. “My lord,” he said, when he was within good distance of the king.
“Thannis,” said the king in a hasty tone. “Have you found it?”
“Not quite, my—”
Zladi leaned forward. “Then why have you come before me?”
Perceptively he said, “To assure my lord that such things cannot be found?”
The king was disgruntled and the guards standing at the far end of the throne moved their spears in tandem.
Thannis fretted for a moment there.
“Perhaps,” said he in his clever manner, “the witches of the dark tower might know something about what my lord asks of his humble scribe.”
The witches had never approved of the new king and would never have their halls graced with his presence. The king had in turn accused them of every sort of peril that befell his kingdom. From pestilences to sunken ships, he declared that the witches were to blame and called on witch hunters to go after them.
This time around however, if he were to implore them for their help, he would have to be more diplomatic in his approach.
“Plus,” Thannis continued, breaching the king’s train of thought, “the dark scrolls for such a dark art, if at all it exists, are to be found in the library of the witches.”
Zladi saw that his options had narrowed towards the dark tower and he’d be damned if he didn’t find it in him to ask for their help. “The bloody hell,” he blurted in exasperation as he abruptly rose. “Well now, Thannis, I shall have need of an envoy to visit the dark tower.”
And so he made an envoy of Thannis to the dark tower of the witches at the Isle of Despair.

* * *

When Thannis entered the presence of the great witch of the dark tower, she was seated on an unbelievably tall stool by the arched window in the pinnacle of the tower. She was tall and imposing as they come as she busied herself pruning her very long nails.
He bowed gracefully, bouquet in hand.
“You can do better,” she said, not looking.
So he prostrated.
“Good. You get to go back with your crotch.” She sighed and put her hands down. “Now how may I help you, scrollmaster?” As if plucking a thought from the air, she added, “How many wives is it you have these days?”
He stuttered at first.
“Err, twelve?”
“Incorrect,” she said rather sharply.
He scratched his head.
“Quickly, what did your king send you for?”
“To inquire if—”
“If black magic is real, yes? What if it is?”
Thannis shrugged. “I’ve only come to learn a few things.”
“Pray tell, what has the king has sent you to learn?”
“Mostly to find out if it is possible to make things just,” wearily he snapped his fingers, “sort of disappear.”
“You want a demonstration?”
He saw her brows arched in seriousness. “Oh my, no. I do not think so. Thank you very much.”
“Have I now made a believer of you?”
He clicked his tongue. “There’s still the aspect of the burden of proof.”
“Your king’s missing something?”
Thannis adjusted his garb elegantly. “Why would you think that? I’ve only come here as an academic to—”
“So Zladi is whole?”
Wowed, he dropped the farce. “So you really do have it. You took it.”
“What’s a bored witch to do these days, eh?”
Thannis shook his head. “You don’t just take a king’s crotch.”
“There it is,” she said, pointing at a table to the side. “Tall and proud.”
He went closer to the table backed up against the wall covered with gothic mural. Behold, on it was the royal phallus upstanding in a nest belonging to one of her old-world birds, with nuts and grains scattered in it.
Horrified, he said, “Do you keep the king’s member for use as some self-pleasuring instrument, or just for the pleasure of staring at it?
“Oh please. If that were so, Queen Nia would not continue to meet her secret lover in the inn around the back of the tavern.”
Thannis was unsure if to not believe her.
“Take it,” she nodded towards the phallus. “Take it and you take a kingdom, eh?”
His eyes fluttered between the phallus and the witch. “You’re tempting me. What do you want, witch?”
“Tell your king,” she said, her voice ringing with contempt, “to prepare to relinquish the throne.”
Upon hearing that from the envoy’s lips when he had traveled back, the king vehemently rejected the witch’s ultimatum. When alone with his wife, he performed his habitual pacing of their bedchamber cursing and sputtering his proud stance. “I will not allow that ugly slut to bark orders to me in my own kingdom.”
“I know,” said his wife lovingly. “But she has you from the balls upward, literally.”
His wife heard him stutter. “Well. . .”
But Queen Nia had an idea.

* * *

Meanwhile, the kingdom longed for a heir from their king, as his counsel informed him between the many moons that passed. They told him there were rumours flying around that he was either unable to seed a heir in the queen or she was somehow infertile for him. He denounced all such things and in fact set down a fearsome penalty against such idle talk. The penalty for going against this ordinance was the clipping of the fingers with searing hot tongs. The severity of the punishment reflecting the depth of the king’s shame.
“Now, let us move on to brighter things,” said Zladi with complete enthusiasm to the audience of his counsel.
They listened for what he had in mind.
Queen Nia had put the idea of holding a long overdue banquet in his head, along with a tiny covert detail between the king, queen and the orchardman.
“But we won’t stop there,” the king told his counsel. Declaring regally he said, “I wish to unite the various ends of the kingdom with this banquet.” The counsel exchanged confused expressions. “I wish to invite the great witch.”
The counsel shuddered.
But since the king’s word was law, unchecked by the unanimous silence of his counsel, preparations for the banquet was to be underway.

* * *

In the great Hall of Lore under luminous chandeliers, pleasant music swirling in the air and the chittering of a host of nobilities, the banquet was well attended.
Midway into the socializing, the twin doors of the hall flung open and a tall figure in a racy black flowing gown sauntered into the aisle, her ears and neck adorned with rare pearls under her fabulous bonnet.
The music band deployed a sharp and yet sombre note as she elegantly moved her risqué form past the amazed eyes of the aristocracy who grappled with such improprieties in their thoughts.
Having covered the length of the aisle, she met the king at the end of the long table who welcomed her and offered her a seat by his side. “Welcome, Tessa. Glad you could make it,” he said managing a smiling.
“I’m sure you are,” she took her seat, giving an affected smile, conscious of the many eyes on her.
Under the gibbous moon, a quickstep dance played out between the guests while the king leaned into Tessa to make his concerns known.
He wagered, threatened and pleaded but she remained unmoved. She drank up the contents of her goblet, ignoring him and holding out her sobriety so far into the night. When she finally felt like it, she turned and told him she had a proposition. The king braced himself to reject it.
The band of cello and harp was strummed by a rapid notch or two upwards and the guests attuned themselves in even quicker steps.
Zladi’s hands struck the maple table in frustration.
Tessa didn’t flinch.
“That is my condition,” she said too calmly as she took up her goblet frivolously and drank from it, cleaning the smudges at the edge of her lips with a swab.
She’d evoked an unkingly anger in him as he spoke after snatching some composure, “Then, I must say, you’ve sealed your fate, my dear.”
“Oh yes, your little poison in the goblet. I thought it tinged the taste too sourly,” she said, wearing a self-satisfied smile that quickly gave way to a snarl. “Did you really think I could be poisoned, Zladi?”
Zladi was much too dumbfounded to deny the allegation. He was officially out of cards.
She shuffled her feet, getting ready to take her leave. “When you are ready to do what I’ve asked—”
“I am ready,” the king hastily conceded.
“Are you now?”
Unknown to the king, she’d already incanted interesting spells into his phallus and conditioned its return on if the king got up and declared their abrupt union as man and wife, king and queen, consort and escort, co-heirs.
After no little hesitation the king rose and signalled for silence in the hall. A silence so crisp, the king could hear his own blood curl in his body. He went ahead and made a shocking speech under the duress of Tessa’s menacing condition.
In turn Tessa stood and promised king Zladi a dark heir; one who’d hold down the kingdom under its iron grip.
A thunderous applause rippled through the atmosphere of the banquet.

* * *

In the wee hours a frightful-looking ravènix, an abominable hybrid of a raven and phoenix, perched on Zladi’s balcony, cawing rather harshly into his bedchambers. This was the sign: it was there to telegraph his phallus.
Just before the witch called it a night at the banquet, she had whispered into Zladi’s ears assuring him his phallus would grow back to size with every new arousal and use. Hearing that, he had gulped as watched his new queen take her leave.
No more than a moment after the witchy bird flew away, he felt his member, suspended and small, happily hanging between his legs once more.
He heaved his deepest sigh of relief.
His sceptre of continuity was intact.
The king was the king again.