By Chris M. Yates

Scar narrowed his eyes as he watched the Hyenas disappear from view. The dust from the recent stampede still swirled slowly around him in unseen air currents, stained red by the setting sun. The bitter smell of fear hung in the air, a legacy of the terrorfied herd. It made Scar feel restless.

At last, after all the years of cowering beneath that ignorant fool Mufasa, the Pride Lands were his. All the creatures living in it would now bow down before him. He allowed himself to smile. A pity, he thought, that he wouldn't see his hyenas kill that annoying brat. Life could be so unfair.

He turned slowly, his eyes lingering a while down the gorge, as he pictured the demise of Simba. Let the hyenas have their fun. The cub wouldn't escape now. Not now that his father was lying broken in the dust behind him.

Scar paused as he reached his brother's body and looked down at it with an air of disgust. Even now, there was still a tangible aura of power that surrounded the dead monarch.

Scar stood there for a while, gazing at the now peaceful features of his brother's face. He would never open those eyes again.

A touch of mock sadness edged his voice as he spoke. "So, dearest brother. Your rule finally comes to it's inevitable end."

He began to pace slowly around the body as he continued his rhapsody.

"Now you will never know the torture I endured as your younger sibling. I should have been King! Not you. Do you understand? I am simply claiming that which is rightfully mine. That which was wrongfully denied me by your birth!"

Scar snarled as he remembered. Mufasa lay in the parched dust, unmoving.

"The endless taunts. Always picking up the scraps that you considered unworthy. Always second best in the eyes of those that mattered. Everything was yours. Did you ever once stop to consider how lucky you were?" Scar paused. "I don't believe you did...

"No, not happy to be given the advantages I never had, you took Sarabi from me. She was mine. You had no right! I loved her, brother. Now, I see only loathing in her eyes..."

Scar was silent, his own eyes filled with sorrow and remembered pain. In a moment, they were filled with a maniacal light.

"Brains will always beat brawn," Scar smiled. "A fact of which you must now be well aware. The law of the jungle is nothing but a twisted mockrery.

"My rule shall become a legend, remembered long after your very name has been forgotten. The name Scar will no longer be spoken in vain but in reverence!"

Scar's voice grew louder as he bacame more caught up in his own fantasy. Now that Mufasa's body was as broken as the dead tree that so forlornly framed it, he was finally King!

He began to laugh quietly to himself.

"I am King!" he shouted, and began to laugh louder, throwing back his head in triumph.

"KING!" he roared.

Mufasa's line was dead. There would be no one to challenge his claim to the Kingdom.