This story is about a king and queen who rule an island without any trouble until the queen disappears. The king starts to go mad with grief and worry can anyone help him escape this pain?
Once there was a country where a kind king and queen reigned. One day the queen decided to go on a tour of her lands. She set off alone on a horse, for she was a strong rider. But a couple of days later, the king received a message from the village she was expected to arrive at first. She had never arrived
The king rode for days, visiting village after village, enlisting more and more people to help him search for her. A week passed and the king collapsed exhausted. They could not find his wife.
The loss turned the king mad, the trees stopped bearing fruit and the rivers turned brown in their beds. The people wilted grey as the sky. But this was not enough suffering for the king. He ordered higher taxes, and organized groups of soldiers to visit other nearby lands and bring back map makers. He became obsessed with charting his country.
Map maker after map maker came, but they were never good enough. The king wanted the maps to be bigger, more detailed. Then his men brought him a cartographer from the east, a clever kind man, who realised how much pain the king was in and vowed to do his best to help him. The cartographer came up with an idea. He proposed making a map without a scale, or rather a map to the exact scale of the land. Great nets were set out across the forest to catch each insect. They were crushed to make different colours, and soon the cartographer had a hundred bottles of ink to use. Then the forests were demolished to clear the view of the sky. Tree after tree was mashed with gallons of river water to make the paper. All the animals died, and people began to be poisoned by the polluted river water, but the king did not care. He only wanted to find his wife.
The cartographer began. He started at the western shore, laying down the paper and marking it with where the houses and roads and rivers were. Then he covered the crops with paper, they died from lack of sun, but still, the king did not care. His subjects started to leave the land and sailed to other countries, to be ruled by people less mad and cruel.
Soon only the king and the cartographer were left. The map was almost done when the cartographer found the skeletons of both the queen and her horse on a remote stretch of coast. He rode across the paper miles to tell the king.
The king was so overcome by grief that he stabbed himself. The doctor had fled the place long ago, so there was nothing to be done. He died in the cartographer's arms. After the king had died the cartographer took all of the chopped wood and built himself a small boat and sailed away. The map eventually dissolved in the rain never to be seen or heard of again.
Hope you enjoyed my story let me know in the comments 😊
