” The room contained the embalmed bodies of all the kings of their lineage. The deeper they went into the crypt and the older the coffins were, as his father explained to him and as he could see himself in the less and less complicated stylization of the patterns that adorned the mausoleums.
The first tombs he saw were those of his grandfather and one of his uncles, murdered by his father’s half-brother, Drakos. Then, a tomb with a stripped appearance attracted his attention: it was that of Arcas the Third, the king who had ruled before his grandfather and who had been killed in the middle of a meeting by his advisors (…)
King Evandros, without taking into account the start of dread of his son to the evocation of all these turpitudes, continued to list the kings of their lineage while going back in time: Sippias the Third, murdered at the age of seventeen; Evandros the Second, poisoned by his wife and her lover; Thalysios the Second, murdered at twenty; Opitès the First, murdered the day before his fourteen years by his uncle Aristaios; Aneritos the First, murdered by the former fiancé of his daughter that he had preferred to give in marriage to another and who himself had murdered his uncle, his cousin and his seven-year-old half-brother to sit on the throne. Then the murderous madness of men calmed down with the most ancient kings…