short fiction · 2026-11-02

Marginalia's Coronation

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The king's decrees were written in gold ink on vellum, sealed with wax the color of dried blood. They said: the harvest belongs to the crown. The king's justice is the only justice. The fox is a thief and a liar.

But the fox had slipped into the archive years before, when the librarian forgot to latch the window. It did not eat the scrolls. It read them. With claws dipped in soot, it wrote in the margins: Who counted the grain? Who watched the counters? The king has never held a sickle.

The librarian found the marks and wept. She tried to scrape them clean. The soot had bitten into the skin of the page.

When the famine came, the people stormed the palace. They found the king on his throne, the golden decrees burning in the hearth for warmth. The only legible words left were the fox's soot-scrawled questions, copied now onto shirts and shields.

The fox was long dead, its bones white in the garden wall. But its questions wore the crown.