𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐎𝐘 𝐈𝐍 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐕𝐈𝐒𝐈𝐎𝐍

.ೃ࿐ᴬʳᶜʰᵉᵗʸᵖᵉ: ᴬⁿ ᵘⁿᶜᵒⁿˢᶜⁱᵒᵘˢ ˢᵒᵘˡ ˢᵉˡˡᵉʳ.

In the coming of a cruel time, one must remember that a relished sermon cannot win over nations without the honouring of thyself.—A Palace Of Ulric Labyrinths, Elvira Crest.

࿐SCARLET࿐

|Central Sevgi—??|

|Hadak|

SCARLET AWOKE in a pool of cold sweat, the murky coldness of his unusual dream contaminating his skin in chilly distress. A fitful groan escaped his lips as he lifted his head from its uncomfortable hanging position. It took him a second to register the gilded binds that held both his arms and legs in place.

"It would be wise to not attempt anything bold in your predicament. Those bonds are for more than just holding people in place," a voice drawled.

Scarlet snapped his head in the direction of the voice, not even realising the other person sitting in the corner of the closed and metallic room with him.

A young woman with enthralling umber skin was tucked in the corner, perched beside the entrance with a figure that was vastly illuminated by the hanging lights that glowed a sterile white. She wore a delicate, white, homespun sundress that reached just above her ankles. Golden star-like embroidery decorated the soft tips that slid across her legs. It was as if an angel had seized human form—adorning and flaunting her invisible wings through the white of her robes and the gold that weeded sweetly in between the black of her coiled hairs.

"It wouldn't be much of a first impression if you were tortured senselessly, now would it?"

When Scarlet finally spoke, his voice came out dried and maimed. "Where am I?"

"You're in the Sevgi capitol, Hadak…as my guest, of course." The woman's eyes traced the gold that restrained Scarlet in a paralysing position. "But in the meantime, you are to be restrained until your intentions are cleaned up to the suiting of my people."

Sevgi, the room's machines whirled, Y̶o̶u̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶t̶u̶n̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶g̶o̶l̶d̶

"Do you recall anything before my people found you?" The words came out scripted with her silver tongue. She stood, swaying her way towards him with an elegance that put the beauty of her appearance to shame. "Do you remember if any people were with you on your mission?"

His mission? Franklin had tried to kill him, had killed cherry...no,no...how could he let this happen?

The walls of his head throbbed like they were malevolently smashed apart with a hammer as another suffering wince escaped Scarlet. "What do you think?"

She balanced her head to the side, pure and assaulting amber eyes boring into him as she muttered only the word, "Shame."

Scarlet returned her unwavering stare with a scowl of his own.

"You're to be set on trial," she confided, leaning tauntingly close to him as she tracked her eyes on his lustrous shackles. She knew he could not do anything to her with the harsh chains gouging into his skin. "For the murder of the system's most cherished, Queen Valle Rollovo." Her stare was so unravelling. “A mother to more than just a boy and girl… a mother to whole nations.”

Scarlet scoffed humourlessly as her statement revolved sickeningly inside him. "Murder."

"Yes, murder." Her eyes found his again. They were sharing the same imprisoned air now. "Is that not what I said?"

Scarlet shifted with a screw of his face. "I did not kill any royal justice."

"You did...You didn't. It's Franklin Pyxis' words against yours when it comes to the high council of Sevgi." Franklin Pyxis. She backed away from him, rolling behind him to the machines that beeped an ominous memo. "He has money and you're a murderer. It's pretty simple really." Her voice held humour—hilarity that told scarlet that she didn't quite believe the verdict that ran her glossed lips.

"Who are you?"

Her corner rang with amusement. "I don't know. Who am I, Mr murderer?"

You're infuriating, the letters zapped in his mind. That was what Scarlet concluded the mysterious woman was. Obnoxious, infuriating, that's who you are.

"Somebody must have really loved you." Her sweetly rasped voice came again with a new topic. Her tight twists delineated his skin as she appeared out of nowhere to peer back down at him, the twinkles of room glare reclining on the outline of her delicate figure. Scarlet concentrated his gaze solely on her artic irises of affluent coins.

"Excuse me?"

"Your beauty marks," the strange young woman acknowledged casually. "I read that they show where your past lover kissed you." Her finger hovered just above Scarlet's lips where a twilight coloured dot kissed lacquers into the pink of his top lip. "That's why they were given the name of beauty marks." She withdrew her finger with an enchanting and conspiring smile. "Because they show the beauty of your past lover's long-lost love." Her finger found the bottom of her chin as she eyed Scarlet again. "But I heard elsewhere that the past is much more sophisticated than that—that it's considerably more impressive than that."

Her index finger found his temple and an incredible panic rose within Scarlet. "I could show you the gaps of your past, Scarlet, I...I can you show you."

Electricity shot through him. She knew his name.

"No."

"You need—"

"No."

The touch of her finger pressing against Scarlet's temples made it feel as if he were immersed in a poignant noose of cost. "Sorry, but I wasn't asking for permission, lover boy."

Strange. Everything felt so strange; the scents of bakes cooking into his tastebuds to the lit lamps that explored with passion, all the way to the strange, yet very familiar camaraderie of laughter.

He noted the heavy feeling of his closed eyes and opened them. The faces were what he first recognised— two distinct and unique faces that seemed as if they were traced from the other to be made.

"Paula said I have to wait until next year," the girl spoke, the deflation of her sentence vivid within the dark glows of her eyes.

"Paula clearly doesn't know what she's talking about, sweetie," the woman jabbed with a roll of her eyes, the concave movement of her eyes taking a second to adapt once landing on him. "Right, Scarlet?"

Scarlet didn't speak as he assessed them. They both watched him with strange curiosity, almost as of they could dissect and digest every flow of thought that had ever ran his nerves.

"What's wrong?" The girl's question levitated in the domain as his eyes dove to her smirking face that looked all but human. "You seem scared. Did I do something to make you upset, Scarlet?"

Scarlet hadn't even realised the change of setting until the young and golden draped woman who took at the other side of his chains appeared at his side once again, jewelled hands delicately folded behind her back as she took in the squadron of reinforced soldiers barrelling into a chain of townspeople, their only defence against the slaying troopers being the rotting metal of pipes and tools they used to shield themselves. His eyes fell back on the woman beside him with a questioning look of whats, whys and hows.

"Keep staring at me like that and you'll miss the show," her voice trembled as if they were trapped under an unseen cellar. "Trust me, you'll thank me sooner or later, lover boy."

And then her scene fell apart once again.

JUST LIKE THAT, everything young Scarlet ever loved was gone.

The first court of screams that flowered something cruel within Scarlet's ears were the ones that would haunt him forever. He was seven at the time, his young heart never having experienced the pain of loss until it was everywhere; cutting and mutilating the very same people he, his sister, and his mother had walked past by on a daily. Their bodies piled against the dirt streets, their blood clogging a foul muddy eulogy. Some of them were still alive and begging into impairing screams of fear.

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Fire bristled against the wooden roofs, sirens blaring a terrible call as the violence of everything formed into a gruesome killer. The young boy stumbled about the streets with rundown tears streaming against the latching cinder on his face. All that looped in his mind: his family. Scarlet's heartbeat strangled in his throat as the boy clutched dearly onto the stuffed bear belonging to his little sister—a gift from the heavens that she had stumbled upon and claimed that one dried evening as his town fretted over deficiency.

Where was his little sister? Where was his mother?

The faint clanking of boots was what paused Scarlet. His small hands stiffened against the ragged bear in his grip, his eyes blurred with tears of panic. Ignatius cavalry. The people of his town had always spoken about the different soldiers of their planet with their diverse feelings, but one thing they all agreed on was their fear for the Ignatius troops—the predators of monsters.

Shouts thundered about the town, sick and hurt people against death still fighting for what was left of their homes. It was no use. Every second an orange flame consumed one of the houses of pretty recollections, several other mountains of bodies were dragged precipitously into the town's centre by the platoon.

The man who chose to wear his face unlike his clandestine murderers of evils was the most terrifying of them all—the man that stared at the massacre with awful sustenance, viewing the deceased like plagiarised art. He was the most terrifying because, against the reservoirs of red and ruin, he was the only one who held a brilliant smile for the young boy decorated in the blood of his friends and neighbours. He was the most terrifying because as he stalked closer towards Scarlet, the suffering and calls of help from the remaining townspeople were nothing more than a scene poem the man had witnessed in his exertions before. He was the most terrifying because, for a tragic second, Scarlet saw himself forgetting the casualties around him. The man with eyes of silver blades was the most terrifying for he had caught Scarlet in the system's horrible awe—awe that had the boy wondering if it truly was possible for one person to hold so much savage terror.

The man towered over Scarlet, his black and silver robes gleaming a dangerous title of power against the damning fires. A foreshow firearm peeked out of his robes, waving down the young boy who trembled in their playground of collapse. The soldiers continued their battery as they tossed lit sticks onto the loads of bodies to consume. As smoke clambered into the air, Scarlet cried as he guessed which opaque cloud held the remains of his mother and sister. Which pile of devastation had he not gotten fast enough to? Which burning pile chewed away the last of his family?

"What's your name, boy?" The man's voice was as brutal as the flickering blazes that reproduced in his silver buttons. That vicious voice brought Scarlet nothing but the despair of his planet.

"My Sovereign," a soldier interrupted, armour clinking with each of his heavy steps. He strode with a lion's hunch, trampling over the corpses until he stopped a foot away from them. "She's not here." His mask was angled down in Scarlet's direction. Scarlet didn't need to see his harsh eyes to feel them meeting his low ones. A First Sergeant.

"We will arrive at the Capitol by twilight. She will be there," the Grand General spoke with a cold tongue. His chilled gaze found Scarlet's fiery one again and something offbeat killed his greys. Something terrible. The deep trenches of his voice hummed with a darkness of the night wind as he spoke that one tormenting order. "Bring the boy."

One second Scarlet lacked the right strength to carry himself over the blood-drenched ground, the next he harboured more than enough strength to struggle against the large and masked soldier who tossed the boy over his shoulder with frightening adroitness. His protesting screams were an iceberg crashing in with the volcanoes of his planet's killers.

And then it all died out once he saw them.

His mother wailed and begged, her once delicate dress an ugly shade of damage that looked as if it was forcefully ripped away from her skin. The soldier pulled her by the hair, her golden extensions poking out of their strangling grip, hollering against the storm of pain as they dragged her into the town's centre.

Intari didn't put up as much fight as his mother. His sister followed the grip of the soldier that held her tightly, red and watered-down eyes the only show of her fearful emotions. Her eyes connected with the blazing bodies before them and then her composure broke. Her person fractured into ferocious screams as she yanked and pulled in intentions of escape. Their mother took Intari's veil of hopelessness once she noticed the source of her daughter's panic. The fires clattered cruelly as they feasted on the bones and flesh of the dead.

"No! Stop! Let them go!" The soldier who held Scarlet hesitated into a stop as his Sovereign halted to heed the boy’s torn screams with inhumane gaiety. "Please!"

Intari turned at her older brother's fearsome shouts for them. Her fighting faltered enough that she could feel the hot bruise of flares as her capturer shoved her closer to the dooming pile.

"Scarlet!" Her yanking proceeded as she toiled to reach her brother. "Scarlet! Run!"

A cold finger touched against the skin on Scarlet's temple. It was as if someone held an ice cube to his skin until it melted to a rotten purple. It burned and froze him as the screaming figures of his family faded into two people who he had never seen before. The girl tugged and bit at the person who held her, her eyes glued on him as she cried, "Don't touch him! Scarlet!"

"Who will you choose?" The menacing man looming over him asked. Scarlet recognised him. Ignatius’s Grazabellien Grand General. The second prince of Draco. Gothic Mortimer. A leather-gloved hand was held out towards Scarlet as the instance of option redden into a strange pity Scarlet could not find the inception of. Was that exacerbating feeling at the pit of his stomach hate?

"No! Scarlet! Please don't listen to him, Scarlet!" The older woman shouted. The masked soldier behind her struck her in the back of the head with his gun as anguish fell her lips. "Please."

"Pick, boy." The general dragged his gloved hand closer to the young boy and Scarlet could feel the soldier carrying him become unnaturally stiff. "You or them."

Them.Them.Them.Them. Pick them.

Pick yourself, The Grand General's infernos whispered, You don't even recognise them.

Traitor.

Intari’s face tore with betrayal as she watched her brother's hand fix with the grinning General's. No more cries fell her wobbling lips as tears gushed down her cheeks.

Their mother's face carried just as much hurt, her revolts becoming even more audible as she quarrelled the grip of the soldiers around her while sobbing in a tragic snare of, "Don't fucking touch him!! Don't touch my baby!"

"So be it," the Ignatius premier replied. The last thing Scarlet saw was the icy tips of the man's gloves pressing into the skin on his forehead and the two shackled bodies of the strange mother and daughter duo becoming one with the ruby masses of expirations.

Their dying screams hurt Scarlet for more reasons than he could realise.

Them. Them. Them. Them. You should've picked them.

And just like, everything the young boy had forgotten he had ever loved, was gone.

"The last I remember, Arch, this kingdom belongs to my father," the costly assertion of a woman pulled Scarlet out of his visions of dire fiction, the fervent tears crawling from his eyes charring colour into his skin. "And whatever belongs to my father, belongs to me."

Two figures hung over Scarlet from a distance, their bodies almost clouded against the glints of light reflected by the wide open security door. The larger one, Scarlet realised with a better squint of his eyes, was a well-polished man with light, maroon, greasy hair that was accentuated by blond streaks of hair that cascaded along the sides of his face—a sharp contrast to the younger woman who he gripped firmly with one gloved hand. Small wrinkles frowned into Arch's sunless skin, eyes cloaked with shadows that made it come across as if he had not seen the taste of light a day in his life. Dim olive eyes found scarlet's for a split second over the girl's shoulder, pale stare malignant as he clenched his grip on her, his open hand tensed on the crested blade reclining off his waist.

An inconspicuous warning to the chained man behind them: Do not try anything.

"Respectfully, Your Highness," the man spoke with a hollow echo pursuing his voice. "Your father has left me with instructions to keep you from the west wing until you have been properly redeemed for the arrival of the Rollovos."

Your Highness. That was why she had seemed so familiar to Scarlet. He finally recognised her. Nobilia Arcade, Princess of Selvig and daughter of Calignes's legendary Epiales Arcade. In a couple months, the ruler of all of the system.

"Re—Redeemed?" The princess spat, voice hard like it had been clogged with both jagged and sharpened boulders. "Redeemed?" Arch looked almost enthralled by Nobilia's stumble—as if he had already known just how much his selection of words was driving her to the tip of his undiscovered blade.

"Seems too much of a merciful phrase for the likes of someone who was supposed to be so great," he taunted, still sizing her up with a domineering tug of her arm. The words came out without much force, cut-throat liquid accepting its fate at the ridge of a waterfall.

The princess's face firmed with several assertions, though her lips could not manage a single one to hiss back to the pretentiously governing man. Instead, her irritated eyes fell back on Scarlet.

I offer you a gift, lover boy, the words came out a wordless whisper carried by the immobile breeze in the cell, pretty brown lips unmoving as Nobilia dragged as close as Arch's grip would allow her. And you will take from Gothic Mortimer everything he took away from you with my gift.

She was not as close to him as she had been when he first awoke, but looking at her now, glossy eyes that mirrored his own dreary face, Scarlet believed he could finally read every trait that was commemorated on her round face.

He gritted his teeth and stared back. "You can't hurt a man by taking from him something he never had to begin with." His words were said aloud rather than flowing through Nobilia's non-existent current, prompting Arch to turn to him in displeasure, loathing the staring contest between the motionless princess and her shackled murderer.

I am a descendant of the Malcolm Alerian, her lips lifted just this once, One of the last—not to speak, but to flash Scarlet a hubristic smirk, looking him down hard as the declaration drifted. I can ravage just about anything with almost everything and nothing.

"Seeing all you've suffered, I will give you the gift of your freedom along with the gift of being able kill them." Them? "His children."

As far as Scarlet knew, Gothic Mortimer only ever had a son, an ill-tempered boy named Renon. A sociopath.

"His son and his bastard daughter." Arch scowled from behind Princess Nobilia, no objection to her proposal. "He's been looking for her, meaning she's clearly of some importance to him."

He had a daughter.

So that's who he had been looking for when he killed my family...his daughter. His.

Intari...her blood will be for you.

There was a beat of silence before Scarlet turned from his thoughts and eyed Nobilia, inviting the wary question, "But?"

"But," her sweet reply matted at his eardrums. “You will help me find my cousin before the imperial coronation.”

"Your cousin?" Scarlet let out a washed sneer in her direction, the tremors of his incredulity a decomposition that dimmed the room. "And who may that be?"

Her stare was diabolical.

"Harpy Alerian."