The Burning City

From a certain angle in the sky, the world seems to stretch on forever, a blanket of mazes, of shapes and colors that blur together in a haze of imprecision. Upon closer inspection, this haze reveals itself to be a network of buildings spread across a vast expanse of land, clustered citadels and castles of stone, and houses, and streets of rough hewn rock, or in the poorer places, dirt. The majority of these settlements are surrounded by walls, for the inhabitants of these places are prone to war and greed, and have grown wary of the ambitions of their neighbors.

To the viewer, it may appear strange that in the midst of this sea of life and industry, there lies a barren tract of earth. To one side, the vacant land is nestled against the densely wooded mountain area, widely feared and certainly never entered because of the stories that surround it. Otherwise, it is edged by the old trading roads that run throughout all the lands, and the dense settlements beyond. The people who pass by this strange place observe an odd deference to the land, and the more superstitious ones sometimes place flowers on the rubble strewn here and there, so many stones overgrown with vegetation. The exact history of this place has been lost in the shuffle of time, but it is commonly assumed that it was once of some importance to be so desecrated, and deserves a sort of wary, uncertain respect. There are many stories told about the land, passed down through the years with varying degrees of similarity. In any case, there can be no knowing which is correct. This, however, is the story told most often.

Once upon a time, there lived a king whose castle reached so high into the sky that he could see not only the whole of his kingdom, but the neighboring one too. Night after night, this king stared at the glimmering lights of the adjacent kingdom called Myrea, and dreamt of the day he would burn it to the ground.

In the years since its creation, Myrea had thrived into a richly cultured and thriving metropolis, ruled by a powerful and wealthy dynasty. But as the years passed, in the eyes of many, Myrea had settled into a stagnancy of morals and progress, and the era of its greatness was waning. Corruption had settled into its ruling class, as is often the case, and the once great land seemed to be imploding on itself. While the upper class lived in unbounded luxury, the peasants were confined to a hand to mouth existence, laboring long days for the society’s more affluent members. Despite this notable gap between the classes, Myrea had become famed for its extraordinary wealth, and it was rumored that the king’s own coffers contained the wealth of ten kingdoms.

It was with this in mind that the neighboring king stood on the balcony of his palace, surveying the distant world that lay beyond his gates, on perhaps one of the last days in the long string of days and months and years that the kingdom called Myrea existed to be seen. For it was only slightly earlier that day that the king himself had finalized the plans for the demise of the diseased kingdom, and his own extraordinary profit. The king’s reasons were great and many, but for the most part were the old reasons, of greed and imperialism and politics. After a reign littered with wars and battles, he had learned to strike while the iron was hot, and Myrea had never been so weakened as it was today. To conquer the kingdom would be a simple matter. Myrea had hardly a standing army, most of the official state funds having been squandered on the luxury of its ruling class, so the struggle would be brief. The palace would be looted for its wealth, the coffers emptied, and the city would be burnt.

This was the wartime custom of the kingdom, to conquer and destroy completely, for it was not the land that they wanted, but the wealth. All denizens of Myrea would be condemned to death, special care being taken with the king and royal family, one member in particular. War could not be waged without consequences, and there were other surrounding kingdoms to be considered. Over the years, a series of treaties had weaved their way between the lands, and a war could upset the delicate balance between them. All this the king was wary of, and he staked his military ambitions on one thing; an ancient Myrean prophecy, dictated by a witch rumored to live in the forbidden mountains, that foretold that when the eldest child of a king of Myrea should die an unnatural death, the kingdom should be forsaken to fate, and fair claim to whoever should take it. This, being one of the ancient prophecies, was beyond reproach. To this end, the king had called upon the service of a professional; a man who he could be sure would do his job discreetly, and leave nothing to be traced to his employer. His task is to kill the princess, the king’s eldest living child, before dawn, and his location is a certain distance within the gates of Myrea.

Outside the walls of the Myrean castle, the moon shone brightly, casting patterns on the walls where the guards paced below, and one could be forgiven for thinking that all was as ordinary as it had ever been. This assumption would, however, have been a woeful mistake, for at that very moment of moonlit vigilance, a window snapped shut, and a young man materialized within the castle hall. It was with no small amount of sadness that he surveyed the quiet beauty of the hall, a small part of a world he was tasked to help destroy. As he strode silently down the length of the corridor, his thoughts raced quickly through the carefully laid plans. The princess must be dead in no less than an hour, he thought, if he was to have time to escape before the gates closed at the strike of morning. Her body was to be left on the floor of the bedroom, while her necklace, trademark of any member of the royal family, would be hidden in a pre-determined spot outside the castle for the neighboring king to recover later and display to other kingdoms as proof of her death. He would be long gone by then, fled through the kingdom gates to await payment from the faraway king, his latest client.

After that would be another job, another payment to add to his growing purse, the profits of his job in the unhappy business of death. Throughout his travels, he had built a wide base of clientele, who repaid him with the thing he’d desired most from youth; money. He had not always been as fortunate as he was now. Once he had lived in the slums with his mother, had suffered under contempt, scorn, and poverty, and had been forced to fight. But even then he had hoped for more. His business had not come out of the need to avenge himself on the society that brought him so low, or any great skepticism or violence in him. He had simply been forced to sink or swim, and chose to carve out a living by any means. It was true that he was the best person suited to the job, considering his skills. Through an extraordinary set of circumstances, he had once had the good fortune to save a fairy and had been given in return his most valuable payment yet, the gift of invisibility.

But circumstances had changed him, and he realized after traveling so far and back, that things are the same wherever you go, and there’s not much money can do to change that. On the surface maybe, but not below. In any case, he thought as he neared the last door on the left, I might be doing her a service. You could hardly call this a life.

The way inside was easy, though to be fair, it was never meant to be. After all, the architects of the castle could not have figured on invisible men climbing through windows, bypassing the elaborate network traps and devices meant to prevent intruders from reaching the king’s only daughter. The princess herself was forbidden to be seen by anyone at all, aside from the king and the female guard who kept constant watch outside her room. The king figured this lack of exposure was safe, considering the personal risk to his kingdom should she fall victim to the wrong ambitions.

Beyond the doorway, the young man heard the princess stir. Alone tonight, as every night, she wept, and justified the future to herself. Outside the narrow slat that served as her window, she glimpsed the moon swimming in the darkened sky, and wished that she might drown in it. She had no time to think more on this, however, before she heard the slight thud of something heavy being dropped outside the door, and the rattling of quivering hinges turning. By the time she had gotten to her feet, he was inside, a dark figure silhouetted against the wall. There was a moment of silence then, the hesitation in a clearing of the hunter and the hunted, but the air was not clear, even then. It hummed with words, and thoughts and feelings, and that certain scream that silence has when it’s waiting to be broken. He approached her slowly, as not to frighten, but she was frozen in anticipation, and would not move. She realized now, as she never had before, how little she would care to lose her life. He moved closer toward her, and in a swift gesture, grabbed her arm firmly in his hand, above the place where his knife glinted in the night air. His face was close to her now, and in a sudden rush of fear to her head, she called out in a voice she could not recognize or understand. In a moment, worlds are smashed, wars are won, cities burn. In a moment, a dozen years of resolve collapse, and a murderer falls into a sympathy for his victim that is something like love, if not the feeling itself. It was then that the would-be killer knew with all the conviction of his own strong emotions, that he could never carry out his task. For the first time, he felt the fire of desire and a rush of passion. Something different had to be done, and very fast. ‘Listen to me, if you wish to live’ the young man instructed, his voice firm and tense. "Stay within this room until I instruct you otherwise. Do not scream. If you make a sound, you will die.’ With that, he left the silent princess, returning from the hallway with the lifeless body of the maidservant from outside the door. Quickly, the princess followed his instructions, exchanging her clothes with that of the lifeless servant. When she was through, her companion took her hand, and in a series of brisk steps led her to the door, where he stopped and in one quick, silent movement snapped the necklace from where it rested at the base of her neck. She followed him, half fear half hope, down the hallway, and through a window, where gently he fixed her on his back. As they moved downward to the ground outside the castle, she thought she saw him turn to nothing, as if made of air, but did not question this. She knew there existed in the world a multitude of things she did not understand. Even if she had wanted to, she had no breath.

They traveled all through the night and into the day, weaving a strange maze through the kingdom, resting in hidden places only to set out again, anticipating nightfall. It now appeared to both that there was no hope for either within the walls of Myrea, and no hope of anything beyond them either.

Escaping from the castle in the dead of night, it was at last apparent to the deathly entrepreneur what he should have sooner realized; that he himself was among the victims of Myrea. Even in the inky veil of night, it was apparent to all that knew to look that the gates of the kingdom were closed, and the lights that danced like embers in the distance were not weary travelers or merchants, but an army in waiting, death at the doors of a forsaken kingdom. He would die too, the young man thought. He was never meant to live, nor were the secrets he carried with him. It was evening now, as the two figures approached the edge of the city, the place where the streets tapered off and the buildings faded into the horizon. Here there was only green, where grass crept from beneath their feet to the edges of trees, then stopped and faded to black, a gaping swollen mass of black, an open mouth where only the shadows lived, and the things that lived off the shadows. Now the night was here, and the travelers stopped to look back at the world behind them. In the distance, there was a sound that might have been a scream, and a glint that might have been a flame. There was a rising up of the sorrows of the city, a billowing cloud of grey, before the world exploded into brilliant shades of red. By now he knew the necklace had been retrieved from where he dropped it beneath her window and the princess thought dead by the world. As she watched her kingdom burst in flames, a funeral pier to a dead princess, she did not cry, but only said, so faintly as to be washed away by the wind, ‘Let nothing grow here from the ashes. Let only loss commemorate this place. Death to death.’ In the light that spilled from the lantern kingdom, two figures moved towards the forest, into the dark, and were swallowed by the night.

In the years that have passed since the story was told, no ending is certain. There are many things that live in the dark, and many more that are said to. In some kingdoms, it is said the frightful witch who lives among the trees of the forest, herself as old as time, devoured them, or spelled their death. Others say the carnivorous animals of the forest descended on them, killing them instantly. But there are others who say that they still live, preserved in the magic of the forest, never to emerge, hidden from a world of flames.