4 ideas
Erif Der's father, Harn Der, marries her to Tarrik, the Corn King of Marob, so she can use love-magic to drain his power and let her father's faction rise. Once she is Spring Queen and shares the ritual that makes the fields grow, she comes to love Tarrik. Her magic, her family loyalty, and her sacred office then pull in opposite directions, and the plot cannot succeed without harming the harvest it depends on.
In sacral kingship the ruler's physical and moral condition is believed to pass directly into the crops, the weather and the community's luck. His potency, his guilt, his grief and the ritual sex of the spring festival therefore become matters of public survival. Because of this, private acts such as a killing inside the family become a pollution that the whole society must deal with through ritual cleansing.
When Tarrik studies Stoic philosophy with Sphaeros in Greece, he gains a vantage point from which the Corn King's rites look like one custom among many. That analytic distance weakens his ability to simply be the god during the ritual. Belief systems here are sustained by unreflective enactment, and learning to explain a rite costs you the ability to live inside it.
The Spartan king Kleomenes III revived Agis IV's program of cancelling debts and redistributing land. He was defeated at Sellasia in 222 BC and fled to Ptolemaic Egypt, where he died in a failed rising in Alexandria in 219 BC. According to Plutarch, a snake was seen coiled around his impaled body and the Alexandrians honored him as a hero, so a political revolutionary ended up treated as a dying-and-rising sacred king.