The Day the King was Killed

Chapter 1

For a while before this happened, there was a Red girl, Mare Barrow, who had been brought into the palace and treated as a Silver because of her power of lightning control. She had fallen into the ring during Queenstrial and survived the electrical shock of the lightning field separating the girls from everyone else. The reason she was kept in the palace and not killed was because the event had been broadcasted across live television and almost everyone in the country saw it happen. They couldn't just pretend that it didn't happen.

So, Mare Barrow was brought into the palace as Lady Mareena Titanos and was betrothed to Prince Maven Calore. And this plan was working until Barrow somehow joined up with the Scarlet Guard while she was living at the palace.

For those of you who don't know, the Scarlet Guard is a group of Reds that are rebelling against the Silvers for "unfair treatment." Their leader is unknown to us, but we do know that they have been operating in Norta for a few months now. Even though we aren't entirely sure as to who is leading them, we have reason to believe that it is Barrow.

As she was working with the Scarlet Guard, the royal family was preparing for the annual move to Archeon from Summerton. But, obviously, there had to be something that went wrong. As the royals were starting preparations for the parting ball, Barrow was working with the Scarlet Guard to destroy the royals' plan.

During the ball, four high class Silvers of noble families were attacked. These four Silvers were Belicos Lerolan, Ellyn Macanthos, Reynald Iral, and Ptolemus Samos, brother to Lady Evangeline Samos, who, at the time, was engaged to Prince Tiberias VII. Three out of the four nobles were killed in this attack. To make matters worse, a bomb was set off in a far corner of the ballroom killing at least ten others, including Belicos Lerolan's young sons.

After the ball, the Scarlet Guard operatives that were in the palace at the time of the attack, were put into a small cell in the palace. The next morning, the Reds were gone, and all of the Sentinels on duty at the time had no recollection of what had happened at the cell the night before. We now believe that Barrow let the Scarlet Guard members escape with the help of Julian Jacos, uncle to Tiberias Calore VII and brother to the late queen Coriane Jacos.

From this moment forward, the king and queen no longer trusted Barrow, not that they had in the first place. Of course, they couldn't tell her that, seeing as she had already betrayed them multiple times, and might be able to do much worse with that information.

Now, many of you must be thinking, "Well, Prince Maven was betrothed to Lady Titanos, wasn't he? Couldn't he just have figured out what was happening and stopped it?" The answer to that question is no, he could not have stopped it because he had trusted and loved Mare with all of his heart, and he never even saw this coming. No one in the palace was prepared.

After all of this, Barrow was still communicating with the Scarlet Guard, no doubt planning a way for her to escape from either of the palaces. No such plan would work, mind you, since the royals and nobles had been preparing. They believed that they were ready for such an attack. They believed that they were unstoppable. They thought that they would only be facing a few harmless Reds with beat-up, old weapons. They never thought about the fact that there could be more of them out there, more of the Reds like Barrow. They never even stopped to consider the possibility that there might be Silvers that teamed up with the Scarlet Guard.

If they had considered those things, they might have been safe. They might have succeeded in their battles against the Scarlet Guard. Instead, they thought too highly of themselves and thought that they were the greatest people to ever walk the Earth.

Now that you know the basics on Mare Barrow and her history with the royal family of Norta, you should probably know all that is necessary to know about Crown Prince Tiberias Calore VII, or, as better known to most, Cal.