4: The Emperor

Armor and stone and power and stone tablets erected on the poles of the corners of the city. They flash through his dreams with the clang of sword on sword, lance against lance, all contained and pressed and pulped in the controlled panic  of a tourney. His thoughts are in orange and red and black and slate gray, in the comfort of a strong hand that claps you on the shoulder, in the lines and lines of oak trees running as pre-positioned shade along a straight path.
His throne is hewn from granite and might, roughly, uniformly decked with the sigils of Aries. His kingdom is resolute, complete, absolute, flourishing, plentiful, prodigal. He raises it up from brick and mortar, stone by stone, his hands growing calloused from the strain of the weight of the push of the people. The people surging against him, calling for a solution, for he is king, now and forever, until order and reason unravel into chaos like errant spools of thread.
So he rises up, shoulders back and head high, with the blaze of a plan in the whites of his eyes, and the will to follow through in the fields of his pupils.
When he smiles it is rare. Approving. Loving and fond and praising, upraising, uplifting like the sense of fat, little legs resting on the broad shoulders of your father. When he offers affection it is like water, like plants that aren't parched but could stand to be watered just a bit more, and when his arms clasp around yours, it is the rainstorm that revives this year's crop.
He knows this somewhere in the back of his mind, but it is muffled by the steady 1-2-1-2 march of soldier's boots and maps of plots of ever-changing, ever-shifting, ever-buzzing border lines he's trying to bring to absolute zero, muffled by the petitions of peasants and this year's river level, and hard lines, hard lines, rising up and swarming his head so he turns to logic for clarity.
His mind is a montage of felled trees for timber and risen huts for shelter and each day of his begins with the clang of the drawbridge lowering.
Such is the life of an Emperor, whose hours are capured by the growth of a kingdom, who hasn't the time for the flourishing or fluttering or clouding of his heart. He hasn't the time to show he feels more than the mere beat and blaze of the orange sun on his tanned and hardened skin.