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Talysse

D eath is constantly on the back of my mind since the day my parents died.

On that day when everything was lost, I stood for hours at the gallows, long after everyone left. My eyes were fixed on my parents’ lifeless bodies, dangling in the wind like rag dolls. I have searched that magical pool inside me for any spells to bring them back to life; I prayed to all Elders, and I cried. Without any success, of course. I was a terrified child, not a necromancer. So, I just stood there and watched helplessly their faces change, turn dark, and the crows get cockier. One landed on my father’s shoulder, and I chased it with a rock, but it returned with friends.

The vision of my own death crept into my young mind back then. When Friar Ben came to take me to the orphanage later that night, my first question was: “What happens to people when they die?”

He gave me the standard tale of Atos’s Underworld that looks a lot like our world, but the good people are having good lives, and the bad ones are going to hell pits teeming with demons, but somehow, this story has never been satisfying for me.

Well, tonight, I am about to find out.

I step onto the scaffold, nearly slipping on the pools of blood of the Unseelie court mage. Her headless body, soaked in crimson and tossed aside like a broken toy, demonstrates what awaits me.

This is when the terror strikes, its sticky tentacles wrapping around my feet, nearly making me stumble. I have always had different scenarios about my own end, but I have never imagined that it would be by the hand of the man I feel so drawn to.

Yet the Elders, cruel as they are, seem to have other plans for me.

I struggle to realize what is happening when hordes of Tainted swarm the nobles around the scaffold.

“Talysse,” the prince calls me back to my senses, “run, Talysse. Take the Guardsmen’s door.” He points at it, and I nod, still processing that turn of events.

When life gives you sour apples—

You bet I’ll make some fine apple pie out of this second chance.

The mysterious blade that seems to appear when I need it slips into my hand, and I hop off the scaffold. The Tainted are busy pulling out the intestines of a courtier two feet away to notice me, and just like that, I make it to the small, inconspicuous door in one of the towers.