Stand Up and Walk

BONUS CHAPTER: Ashes and Gold

Take this 13k word royalty AU that I wrote instead of writing the next chapter :) Enjoy, I think this is the best thing I've ever written. Be sure to leave this a like if you enjoy, because I'm really proud of this.

You arrive at dusk.

Your dress is in tatters, mud caking your hair, and your feet bleed through the holes in your thin slippers.

You stumble through the halls of the cold castle, the taste of ash and despair filling your mouth. The guards are rough with you, firm hands on your slim shoulders as they drag you along.

They don't believe you. Didn't believe your maid, even as she lay dying in their arms, telling your story with the last of her strength, having given everything and more to get you here.

And why should they?

A bruised, filthy child like yourself—the final princess of a foreign land? The sole survivor of a fallen kingdom? The last of her kind?

You still don't believe it yourself.

You lift your hands to rub at your fingers, to twist at your rings, but then you remember that they, too, are gone.

Taken from you. Stolen on the roadside, by the man with the knife who'd attacked your maid when she tried to protect you.

Robbed of your last shred of home.

Your eyes are burning, but you don't have any more tears to cry.

...

The cell is dark, and cold.

You're choking on the smoke that fills the air, flames licking at your skin, burning behind your eyeballs. Your throat is raw, lips chapped, skin still filthy from the long journey here.

The stone floor is rough against your cheek as you fall to your side, curling up in a ball around the empty, hollow ache inside you.

This has to be a nightmare.

You keep waiting to wake up. To feel your mother's hands, warm and soft on your face, rubbing rosewater on your skin to rouse you from your slumber; to hear your father's voice ring out through the silence, to hear him recite his morning prayers.

But nobody is coming, and nothing but silence fills your ears.

You rub your fingers together, feeling naked without the gold bands to glint against your skin.

The world, you come to realize—lying cold and alone in the darkness, feeling the ghost of your kingdom claw at the air around you, moaning and groaning—is a cold and cruel place, with no pity for a lonely child.

As it turns out, you do have a few tears left to cry after all.

...

The queen smells like lavender.

She comes to you herself, opening the door to your cell and kneeling before you. She says the royal family had received word of the destruction of a nearby kingdom, of the death of its royal family.

Of the burning of farmlands and forests, towns scorched to cinders, the earth salted beneath enemy feet—no survivors remaining.

A mighty nation—razed to the ground overnight, nothing more than a footnote on the pages of history.

Whoever wrote the letter, she tells you, looking at you with pity that makes your mouth taste bitter, clearly didn't know about you.

She asks you for your name, and when you whisper it out in a hoarse, broken voice, she struggles to replicate the sound. Her tongue trips and stumbles over the syllables, clumsy like a child.