The deafening roar of fire is overwhelming. The dark corners of the throne room are lit with dancing orange and yellow lights. And yet the chandeliers have gone out, resulting in eerie darkness only lightened by all consuming flame. The sole entrance to the throne room caved in minutes ago, a burning wooden beam crashing through the door frame moments after I dove into this crumbling room to escape the countless revolutionaries. Now I’m trapped in this oven of a room.

With the bastards gone, the only sound echoing through this soon-to-be tomb is the crackle of a thousand flames. If I were to make another choice, I wouldn’t have dived into this room. No, I wouldn’t have been in the palace on this day in the first place. No, I wouldn’t have been born into this death-sentence of a family. Royals? I scoff out loud. Hardly royal now, though. Not with my mum, my father, my brothers and sisters all dead to the blades and bullets of the revolutionaries. Not with the last remaining member of the royal family, myself, sitting on his knees waiting for the roof to cave in on him…

no… No. “No!” My voice echoes through the room, drowned out by the fire. I refuse to die here! I can’t die here! I’ve barely lived! I have so much more to see… so much more to live. There must be a way out. There must be a way out.

The ground trembles beneath me as I rise from my knees. Yes. There must be a way out. The ornate window too high to reach… walls crumbling around me… hallways caved in with red hot rubble… the doorway blocked with a burning pillar… blocked, but if I could squeeze past that pillar… A slow, stumbling step turns to two, and then three, and the pace increases, and soon the stumbling steps turn to a full sprint toward the doorway. Toward my last hope of survival.

Reaching the doorway, I shove at the pillar. It doesn’t budge, and worse, my hands are scorched by the singeing heat of the pillar. There remains, though, a slim opening in between the pillar and the wall. A pillar I could fit through… I push into the thin opening, easily fitting my head through, but the rest gets stuck. Damnit! But, if I can’t fit, I’ll just push harder! Push. Shove. In a final push, a blaring white pain floods through my chest coinciding with a bone shattering crack emanating from my ribs. A rib broken, or several. Slipping past the pillar, the world opens up from a burning hellscape into a moonlit hallway, a light at the end of which lights the path.

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Dragging my feet through, I ignore the scrapes, bruises, and burns. The only thing that matters is survival. And the world looks down on me with mercy today as I take step after trembling step through shards of glass and pools of congealing blood towards the bright light marking the entrance to the palace.

I take one step, two steps, and devolve into all out sprinting as the distance between myself and the entrance goes from fifty meters to twenty five, and ten, and five, and a loud crack emanates from the entrance. The world around me spins as I stumble and fall and roll head over heels through the doorway and into the bright sunlight.

I made it. Wait… my chest. I can’t breathe… I grab at my shirt, looking down in horror to see it covered in blood. My blood. My eyes fall on a young boy, barely a teenager by the looks of it. His rifle shakes as his hands tremble, the slow rising smoke from the end of the barrel forming a skeletal hand reaching for the heavens. A red clad uniform marks the boy a revolutionary as he looks down in horror at what he, no doubt, has never done before.

I made it. I must have made it. Why…? Why didn’t I make it… I came all this way, went through all of that, all for it to be ended by some kid who can barely hold a gun without dropping it. Damnit! “Dfanph ou,” I splutter, the insult choking on my own blood. Damnit… My eyes roll up towards the sky as everything goes fuzzy. I imagined death to be painful, excruciating, instant. Not… this. Not so peaceful.

The world slows to a stop. The boy with the rifle trembles no more. The loud dance of flames stands still. If this is death… it’s not so bad… not so…NO. I refuse. If this is my fate, my destiny, then… FUCK destiny!

Then the world blanches. An excruciating pain threatens to pull me under. Under into the deep abyss. Into who knows where. Death? No. Through sheer force of will, I bear the pain, and something changes. Something deep within me. Something… primal. And suffocating darkness takes me.

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An indeterminate time later, my eyes open in shock to find the blazing sky replaced by the familiar site of my room as it was just the previous morning…