His Right as King Upon first listening, the piece sounded a bit rough for my tastes. The melodic material doesn't particularly stick in my mind after the last note fades, and the overall texture holds a certain cacophonous feel. However, music does not exist in a vacuum for the mere sake of beauty, and it is only fair to scrutinize a piece based on context and how successfully it meets a compositional goal. When reading the story and examining the artwork that the music is inspired by, a great deal of imagery comes flooding to mind, creating a sensible framework that proves the piece artistically competent.
Several musical devices work cleverly with the story that you provide. For example, the sixteenth note string ostinato so prevalent throughout the piece provides a terrible sense of anxiety. It could be representative of how the people feel under their tyrannical king; overworked, frantic, fearful, scrambling to get along. Yet the strings are subdued beneath the brass as if to show how the voice of the people has been silenced. Their fear and disdain only exist as a tense underlying feeling. No one in the kingdom dares to openly speak against the king.
Similarly, the timpani sounds wearily every two beats as if a drum of war. The army marches on in fear and desperation, starved and on edge. The sounding of the male chant is the voices of slaves shouting their "heave, hoe" under the searing brutality of the sun.
The trumpet dissonances toward the beginning usher in the harshness of a new rule, and the diminished chord outlined by the timpani is indicative of the king's maddened instability. The unexpected, shifting modulations are indicative of the ruler's bipolar violence.
At 1:20 though, the tone changes completely. Gone are the wearied chants of slaves and the anxious, hushed whispers of the populace. No longer do the discordant diminished harmonies sound. In their place is new music: Heroic. Brave. Majestic. This is how the king views himself. He is a powerful and noble ruler! He took this weak, pathetic country and shaped it into a glorious kingdom for the world to marvel at! No foe would dare raise their sword against him. He is the protector of the people, a ruler just and divine, the reincarnation of God guiding these poor wretches! And yet even in this triumphant music, slight tensions plague the soundscape in the form of suspensions. These show how polluted the king's self-deception truly is. And then the voices of slaves and armies carry on.
Were these illustrations thought of when composing, meticulously crafted in to paint a sadistic and insidious picture? Perhaps not on a conscious level. If nothing else, however, they show that you have a great intuition as a musical story-teller. You keenly pick the tools that effectively convey your ideas. Your piece is very successful in this sense.
That is not to say that the composition is flawless. Balance could be better executed in my opinion. There were certain instances in which the horn could have been brought out a bit more to make the melody cut through the clutter, or in which the strings could have made themselves more apparent. A few transitions, such as the one around :54, could have been more captivating through the use of a sforzando/piano quickly rising with a pronounced crescendo. The ending seemed unprepared, perhaps tacked on without quite enough consideration. Extending the last few bars by elongating their rhythmic values may have led to a stronger cadence and sense of finality.
That said, I am still impressed with the piece. My criticisms are certainly picky, and your musical intuition shows strong in this work. Your textual storytelling ability is also a wonderful companion to your composition skills.
I enjoyed this and will be listening for more from you!
**Zelda's Lullaby** 
