Mated by The Alpha Dragon: The Exalted Dragons (Book 3)
Page 9
More guards were on their way. I kept pulling the chains on my other arm, this time with the power of both arms and the whole of my body. I was about to release myself completely when I felt several blows strike my face and body. The guard’s heavy boot struck my stomach, leaving me gasping for breath. I turned to look at Elise and she was untouched, but the next thing my eyes could see was blackness.
When I opened my eyes, a heavy blur sharpened, and the sound of chatter pierced my ears along with an awkward buzzing sound that was coming from outside.
“You have caused enough trouble, young man,” I heard the king’s voice merging with the buzzing sound.
I turned my eyes toward him and began to see his face clearly. He held my head up from the chin, stopping whatever words I was about to say from escaping my tongue.
“I do admit, you have some strength in you,” he said, “but not anymore.”
He took out a thick needle that protruded out of a syringe with the dark red liquid and plunged it into my shoulder. I felt the coldness of the liquid flow through my veins, weaving into my blood and spreading to my heart and every other part of my body. The coldness was followed by a sense of frailty that only made me feel my intense hunger and dehydration even more.
The kind of slow death that the king had set out for me and Elise was quite the torture. I couldn’t talk to Elise anymore. We had no ability to speak for a very long time. The sun set again, blank and pointless.
Elise was still unconscious. Something told me that she was dying. The king had done something that made sure I wouldn’t try to release myself from the chains again. One arm was tied to the wall behind me, and the other was tied to Elise’s chains so that if I tried to pull the chains I would tear her arm off her body.
There was no way out, and eventually I realized that our fate would be similar to that of all the people whose dead bodies surrounded us.
“Theo,” I heard Elise’s whisper from next to me.
“I’m here,” I said, with a hint of hopelessness in my voice.
“Can your hand reach for mine?” she asked me.
I thought that she needed the comfort of touch in those last moments of living that we both were going through. I pushed my wrists through the shackles until they were tied right before my elbow. My hands had more freedom to move. I reached for her hand and held it.
But it wasn’t her hands that she wanted me touch. I looked into her eyes and she was smiling, a smile of triumph. I felt the coldness of a metal key sliding into my hands.
“Unlock my chains,” she said. “Quickly, before anybody hears us.”
I slid the key into the keyhole in her shackle and turned it. One of her arms was released. She took the key from my hand and quickly released herself from the shackles on her other hand and her feet.
There were more guards outside, standing quite close to the cell that we were in. It all had to be done as discreetly as could be.
“Where did you get the key?” I asked her, still unaware if this was a reality or a dream that would be broken by the bleakness of the grim truth.
“The guard that you knocked out had the keys with him. He fell right next to me, and before he hit the ground I grabbed the key from the side of his pants,” she said, panting.
Both our bodies were very weak, and the smallest effort she put into unlocking her own chains made her sweat and pant. She unlocked my chains, and finally the both of us were free, but still we couldn’t yet escape the cell that we were in.
There were many guards outside, and there was no way we could take them all down in the state that we were both in. The moment I was completely free from the chains, I took her into my arms, hugged her tightly, and felt the hopelessness escaping both our bodies through that tight embrace.
“What now?” she asked me.
“We wait until our bodies grow stronger,” I told her, unable to think of any other way we could escape this. “Patience,” I added, remembering my father’s only remarkable words to me.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Theo
In the many stories that my mother had told me in my youth, there was one thing that was always repeated. It was always written so that the hero in the end of the story defeats the evil man and lives happily ever after. And maybe that is not quite how reality unveils itself for people, and perhaps it is the hopeless romanticism of the old world’s writers that longed for such endings.
The heroes who I had known throughout my journey were all denied the happy endings that they all deserved. Bernard died saving those helpless children from the king’s Hawks, and Seth was taken away by the king and left for dead in the rivers. And my mother died with only a glimpse of happiness in her eyes.
I had never quite understood her pessimism or her optimism. She was always more taken away by the books that she hid from the entire kingdom than she was by any element of the real world. She used to talk a lot about the old world, sometimes dramatizing how amazing it was and in other times criticizing the blankness and emptiness of it.
I never did understand why she would explain it that way, and perhaps it took me a lifetime to understand that a human only sees things through the lens of how they feel. Matilda was sad. I had never gotten the chance of seeing her truly happy, for when she did really get close to happiness, she died. All her depression was expressed in her attachment to a past that she had never seen, which served to only justify her distraction from the present even more.
I would be making a big leap comparing my mother to the king, but while they were both quite different they were quite the same. My mother only saw the world bright when she was reunited with my father, and only through the lens of love was she able to wear a profound smile on her face. The king, however, had always only seen the world through the lens of emptiness. He had nothing to live for except maybe that ideal image he had of himself being all powerful and worshipped by the many who never had the chance of knowing who he was. They were similar in the way they lived in the past and different in how they went about it. The king wanted nothing but to be as powerful as the kings he had read about, and my mother also romanticized that kind of past but she did so through ignoring the present. He did so by destroying it.
I would never forget the face of the king the last time I saw him. He wasn’t alive but dead, in his human form, dwelling in his own blood and in a pool of that dark red liquid that was the poison of his own making.
It all happened so fast. Elise and I were sitting in the stinking dungeon, embracing, giving one another the power of each other’s body and waiting for the strength to rise from within.
“If we get out of here, how would we live our lives?” she asked me with a subtle dreamy look in her eyes.
“We will, and when we do, we will roam the earth to find a sea that still has life in it. When we find it, we will build a house of stone and live there,” I said, dreaming of that sun and the grains of sand stuck to the bottom of my feet.
“I want to take all the people that the king made suffer and reunite them somewhere where they can all live together and in peace,” she said, “and when I’m sure that everyone around us is happy, I can live the rest of my life knowing you and only you.”
A smile formed on my face. I felt the strength of my muscles suddenly surge through me again when the muscles of my cheeks stretched my smile.
“Let’s go,” I hurried to stand up and lifted her off the ground. “We need to use whatever strength left in us to get out.”
I looked through the window of the door and saw that there were no guards outside. Not a single soul was out there. I knew it was our chance. I wanted to take my father’s body with us, but when I went over to where his body was, it was gone. Elise was behind me, and she pulled me up before the tears formed in my eyes.
Suddenly, the sound of running and screaming came roaring from the outside. Many guards were coming our way. I didn’t know what to do, I thought of hiding until they came inside, but by the sound of it, we were quit
e outnumbered.
“Hide,” I whispered to Elise, “I’ll deal with them.”
“I’ll fight next to you,” she said.
We stood hand in hand, far behind the door. We waited for the noise to come closer, and we didn’t wait long. The door was kicked open, my hands were clasped in a fist, my heart racing. I took a step forward, keeping Elise a little behind me, but the unexpected happened.
“Get out,” the guard shouted.
We both stood frozen, unaware of what was going on. The guard was standing there and unwilling to fight us.
“Go!” his shout was louder. “The guards have revolted against the king, drowned him in his poison. King Harold is dead.”
I didn’t believe what I was hearing, but I had already learned that only the unexpected kept happening to me. I held Elise’s hands and quickly rushed outside of the door. Still fearing any kind of unexpected danger, I stiffened my hands when I walked next to the guard, and he didn’t move a bit.
We ran outside, up from the dungeon and into the castle. There was broken glass everywhere. The huge chandelier had fallen on the entrance of the castle, and the king was lying on the ground right under it, crushed with his own poison. From the looks of it, the whole thing was planned. The chandelier had several glass cylinders that were full of the dark red liquid that the king used to suppress the dragon form. It seemed like the guards had pulled the chandelier down once the king was standing under it, stopping him from turning, and plunged their swords into his back. He was left there to rot with many swords left in his body.
Hand-in-hand, we found ourselves under the sunlight, rejoicing in the freedom that we finally had.
“A lifetime of knowing one another,” I said, as we both swirled under the sun.
“Let’s go to the village at once and sit by the willow tree. I want to relive every moment I was deprived of,” she said eagerly.
“Why do the past? How about up there?” I said, eying the ocean blue skies.
End of Book 3
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Ninteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four