The Twelve Kingdoms

Burn Alone

/// [Beauty &] The Beast

Fire Kingdom ///

"Prince" Azar (because that title doesn't even matter anymore) had been locked in this prison for years. He didn't even remember how he got here, nor his life before. All he knew now was his dark grey room, the labs, and the surrounding rose garden.

Every few days he'd end up in those cold labs, and at the hands of masked robots and needles and metal he'd get pieces of his soul sucked out. His powers weren't working like they used to. He could still set himself, or things around him on fire but he could no longer protect himself from it. Half of his face, his back and his legs had ugly charred burn marks all over.

Sometimes he'd lay on his cold hard bed on his stomach and stare into his pillow, wondering why he just accepted it. The answer never came. He could never think of a reason. But he didn't do anything about it.

The first time he saw Prince Liang in the garden, he looked like a sad and scared lost puppy. In some twisted lonely part of him, Azar felt relieved because now there was someone else who was going through the same things he did. He wasn't alone anymore.

As weeks went by, Azar developed a strange, but impossible, desire to protect Liang from all the bad and scary things. He was so fragile and small and sad. He was the kind of person you'd do anything to protect if you had a heart.

They never really talked. They just quietly walked around the garden side by side. Sometimes Liang wouldn't even want to walk. He'd lean his trembling body against Azar and clutched onto his arm with closed eyes. They'd stay like that for hours sometimes until Liang fell asleep, the fresh burgundy bruises violent against his parchment skin.

It was during those times when something stirred inside of him, shredded old remnants of rebellion and rage. The innate feeling of wanting to hurt the people who have been hurting the one you want to protect. And with each time it happened, that feeling grew stronger.

Eventually, Azar couldn't take it anymore. Liang was in a good mood (or as good as it could possibly be in his situation) and it was one of the rare times he actually talked. Azar didn't remember what Liang was talking about, but what he did remember were his own words. Words of awoken bitterness and rage and please, I can't look at you like this anymore, I can't look at us both.

And that's when she appeared, clothed in answer, and hope, like an angel of death with pale hair, with electric blue eyes, with a shock of metallic red lips. There was an air of acidic familiarity around her, the kind you couldn't quite put your finger on.

And then she was gone, like a raging summer storm of confusion.

Liang was all stuttered sobs and hiccuping pleas. It was like the thin glass wall around his memories shattered and he was terrified, begging for it to stop, pleading for Azar to do something, anything to get them out of here. And that desperation latched itself onto his arm through Liang's clutching fingers, seeped into his bloodstream, into his passively beating heart until he tasted ashes on his tongue.

Later that night, Azar twisted his fingers into the gray pillow as faint screams reached his ears. He always heard them, even when they weren't really there. They were echoes, ghosts of Liang's paling face and fading eyes. It lurked in his mind and whispered into his ears every moment of every day that he existed here. It wouldn't stop, it couldn't stop, not until he stopped existing.

But why? Why did he have to exist in such a world? If only he could get out, if only he could leave and be someone other than a lonely boy who was slowly turning to ashes, hopelessness turning him submissive.