The Darkest of Truths

Chapter 8

It looked beautiful, not the castle of the dastardly and evil Blood King that I had imagined. Then again, Pulvaria looked beautiful too and it's King was far from good.

From where we were positioned, we could see the majority of the western side. I scanned my eyes, watching the small moving dots patrolling along the walls.

My heart began to pound as the reality of the situation began to dawn on me.

We had made it.

We were at Lunara.

I was going to kill a King.

I was going to try and kill a King.

This was insane and stupid. Insanely stupid. I had never even stepped foot near King Thaddeus's castle in Highlen, until a few days ago, for this very reason. It was stupid and I never wanted to die doing something stupid.

Do I really want to die for a war that I don't even want? A war that I'm not even going to live long enough to see let alone fight in it? No, of course not.

Not that I have a choice.

I never had a choice.

This is the death that was chosen for me and it's almost everything I did not want.

At least I'll die fighting.

The only positive of this situation.

"It'd probably be best that I wait until it gets dark," I commented and the two officers nodded in agreement.

Idiot number two pointed towards the far right side of the wall, "according to our sources, your best way in is climbing over the wall there. It's the only part that connects to the main castle.

I instantly looked at him, " your sources? You guys have spies in the castle?"

He laughed as though I had told the best joke he had ever heard, "no! No one can get spies in and the Blood King's allies are too loyal to turn."

So he has allies, loyal ones.

Usually when someone says that a King has allies it usually means that they're people he's bought that can potentially be bought again. People with a price can never resist when someone else can double it.

But genuinely loyal allies?

Something isn't right here.

The idiots continued to explain what they knew. The best way to climb the wall and where the nearest window to the King's study was. They told me that he seemed to spend long hours in there so he should be there for me to kill him. The fact that they were able to recall the information and explain it so well almost made me rethink referring to them as idiots.

Idiot number two, whose name I finally learnt was called Roland, pulled out two thin cylindrical objects from his rucksack. One red and one yellow, both with a white cap on one end.

"These are flares. If you break off the white cap smoke will come out of the tube, the same colour as the tube it belongs to. You will use them to signal us."

"To signal what?"

Roland holds up the yellow flare.

"If you succeed in killing the Blood King, you'll break the cap off the yellow flare. We will wait for you here for one hour, if you're a minute late you can find your own way back to Pulvaria because we'll assume you're dead by then."

One hour. How thoughtful of them.

I took the yellow flare and Roland held up the red flare but I already guessed what using that one meant.