The king’s son becomes the new king, and is prophesied to defeat evil and bring an age of prosperity. His generals and knights all crack their knuckles but he pretty much ignores them and focuses on strengthening the infrastructure of his kingdom. Forty years later he is old and sick but still hearing his subjects’ grievances, and a general’s like “how will you defeat the prophesied evil now? You’re old and weak.” Another visitor, a teenager fresh out of the kingdom’s public education system, looks at the general like he is an ignoramus. The king eradicated poverty, housed the homeless, taught the ignorant, ended class exploitation by abolishing the nobility and imprisoning the corrupt, and established a highly respected guild of doctors that recently figured out how to cure the plague. There are no brigands because there is enough wealth for everyone to live comfortably; hiding in the woods and taking trinkets from people simply doesn’t make any sense for anyone but the desperate, and the people are not desperate. Evil is a weed, explains the teenager. It grows in cracked roads and crumbling houses and forgotten corners, rooted in indifference and watered by suffering. But the king demands that broken things be mended and suffering people be made well.
