The Butterfly Effect

They took him somewhere south of where they were before. It was a place he was completely unfamiliar with. When they actually came to leave him at a building, he had a pretty good idea of what they planned on doing. His sword was taken away from him and he was left to stand there as Svend disappeared to talk to someone.

“Hey, some fresh blood!” one of them called from his cell. “What did you do to get yourself in here?”

“Don’t look like the kid’s killed someone. But I guess ya never know.”

Lucas instinctively backed away from both of them. It was only a minute later that a woman walked out from talking with Svend. He immediately recognized that she was the one in charge here and was best not to be messed with.

The whispers of the others around him only seemed to prove it. “Oh, it’s the warden!”

“‘Ello, fair Lady Zera! You lookin’ lovely this mornin’.”

“Sweet talking isn’t going to make your sentence any shorter,” she hissed back. She turned her attention to Lucas. “I’ve got a special place for you. Somewhere for you to stay before you get to find out if the myths of Vriuh are real…”

Lucas was pushed forward and needed no other motivation to get moving. “You’re going to kill me, then?”

“It seems your list of treasonous acts never seems to end. You’ve been making trouble for the king since you were a teenager, and most of all you decided to start a rebellion… you’ve racked up quite the name for yourself as a traitor. Are you really surprised that we are finally going to punish you for it?”

He knew that there was nothing he could say at the moment that could get him out of it. Instead, he chose to ask, “When’s this big execution going to happen, then?”

“It’s going to take two days to get a response from the king. After that, you’re likely going to be killed immediately. I advise making amends with all of your regrets now before you’re in that void with them forever.”

She didn’t say anything else to him. She led him to his cell and practically shoved him in there, mumbled something about being let out for dinner in a couple of hours, and then left again. Lucas immediately tried to think of a way to get himself out of this. The more he thought about it, the more he wondered if there even was such an option… He needed more information. He needed to know more about who he was trying to convince. There had to be someone who knew the warden well enough to tell him about her; he just needed to find that person.

The Fleyw Bresh had been easy to read. They wanted their freedom, to be able to do what their ancestors could without the king hovering over them. That much was obvious to him, no matter how much they liked to believe they looked content with their current life. He could see no such thing from the warden. There was a kind of air around her that he couldn’t quite place. Somehow, he knew that was what he needed to figure out.

He waited until what he assumed to be dinner, when all of the prisoners were corralled out of their cells and into a mess hall. At first all he did was follow the crowd and, once he sat down, the attention came to him.

It was the two men that had commented on his arrival. “So you’re the fresh blood. I’m Alwin, and this is my literal partner in crime, Folre. We may or may not have tried to bust out more of our buddies and ended up landing ourselves in here with them! Who are you and what did you do to get yourself in here?”

“I’m Lucas,” he sighed, “and I was trying to stage a rebellion against the king.”

“A bold one!” Folre laughed. “Never heard that one before!” He gestured to the empty spots near Lucas. “Mind if we sit with ye? We got this thing of welcomin’ newcomers. Show ‘em city folk what it’s like to be out here.”

“That’s great, because there’s a few things I wanted to see if you knew anything about.” Lucas saw no point in trying to hide it from them. He had much less time than he would’ve preferred so he needed to make sure that every bit of it counted. “What do you know about the warden?”

“Lady Zera? Well, she’s a beaut, for one thing,” Folre mused. “Quite the little attention-grabber.”

Lucas shook his head. “I don’t care about what you personally think of her. Look, I need to figure out if there’s a way I can get out of here before I’m executed. I’m not worried about the rebellion so much as I am the other people I’ll be leaving behind. But I can’t go anywhere unless I can convince the warden to let me out.”

“Everything comes at a price,” Alwin warned, though the foreboding tone was soon switched for a more sympathetic one. “But I understand what you’re trying to do. I had kids before coming here; everything I did was for them. I haven’t been able to talk to them since I came here and it’s been so long that I don’t even know if they’re still alive… So I’m willing to help you do whatever you can to get back to your people. I’ll tell you everything I know about her, all you’ve got to do is use that information and actually get out of here.”

He looked around cautiously and lowered his voice before saying anything. “I come from a territory under her father’s control, so I know a lot more about their story than most. Zera is the only child of a minor lord, but they used to be pretty prominent until about a decade ago. The story varies depending on who you talk to, and I don’t know which one I believe more. Some say her father tried to poison the king. Others say they simply ran into financial ruin. Either way, they needed to repay the king for something. The king couldn’t think of anything better but to take Zera—only ten at the time—and train her for his own purposes. Nowadays she’s garnered the title of the Red Rose as an executioner.”

“Do you know if she’d rather be with her father?” Lucas asked.

“I don’t doubt that she would. Even if she was young, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a mutually beneficial agreement. This place is close to her father’s territory, too—I can imagine what it feels like to be so close to home but unable to leave. It’s its own kind of torture.”

Folre shrugged. “Or she don’t wanna leave. She’s never been seen leavin’ but it’s not like anyone’s caught her talkin’ ‘bout her home, either. Don’t let his confident tone fool ya—he knows just as much as the rest of us: nothin’.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you’re absolutely no help at all?” Lucas reiterated. “I need to figure out what I can use to my advantage when I next talk to her. I can’t convince her to let me out if I don’t know any of her reasoning. There’s got to be something that you know for certain.”

“I know there ain’t none as beautiful as her,” Folre offered. “It’s a shame. Someone like her shouldn’t be in here executin’ people. I bet lotsa nobles’ll be willin’ to give her everythin’ she ever wanted.”

“Folre, the kid here doesn’t look like he’s very good at charming,” Alwin sighed. “Besides, if the warden was swayed by that kind of stuff half the prison would be out by now.”

“I think more importantly, I have a fiancée,” Lucas remarked. He decided to change the subject before it derailed further. “What’s the current state of her father’s territory?”

“The same way she left it, as far as I see it,” Alwin replied casually. “They’re still struggling from whatever happened to them. That, at least, should be something that she was aware of.”

“How willing do you think she’d be to change that?”

“Depends on how far the king’s teachings have gotten to her. If it seeped into the roots of her being… there’s nothing that’s going to convince her out of doing the king’s will. But there’s always the chance that she’s kept a bit of that familial loyalty. If that’s the case then, well, I suppose anything can be possible.”

“I think I might have something to work off of,” Lucas mumbled. “Thank you both for helping. Are you sure there’s nothing I can do for the two of you?”

Folre looked like he happily could have suggested something before Alwin interrupted him with the undoubtedly simpler request, “Just get out of here. And win this rebellion of yours—perhaps there’s such a thing as a second chance for everyone. If not for our sake, then for the people that come after us. There’s a world waiting for this moment, whether you realize it or not. You’ve gotten far enough to demand the attention of the king, haven’t you? Don’t give up now. This means a lot more than you know.”

“They say,” Folre mused, “that a single thing can change the world forever. I wonder if this is one o’ those things?”

Lucas smiled. “I hope so—and that everything’s a bit better once he’s off the throne.”

…

He’d always been the bane of the soldiers’ existence in Alyselin. That didn’t change when he was further away from home, or in jail, or even that he was getting close to being executed. He still did the same things he did wherever else he went: he talked about his goals and pointed out the wrongdoing of their king. And he didn’t stop just because soldiers banged on his cell or he was laughed at because they thought it would be impossible. He’d long since gotten past what the rest of Seothia thought about him.

There was, though, a small group of prisoners that liked to talk to him whenever the guards were out of earshot. They talked about anything and everything, between the serious topics of the rebellion or (if they didn’t know if the guards were still listening) fun stories about their family and friends. It didn’t take long to realize that hardly anyone here did anything more than upset the king somehow.

“You must be pretty confident in this plan of yours,” the prisoner to the right of him remarked. “How sure are you that all your children of Fleyw Bresh haven’t all gone home by now? If they’re even close to here, they’ve heard the news about their leader about to be executed.”

“I don’t have a real reason to think that they’re all still there, I suppose,” Lucas responded with a shrug. “But I’d like to believe that they are. I might have been the person that convinced them it was time but they were slowly coming to that conclusion on their own. Now that they’re all together, I don’t think one little thing is going to bring them apart. There’s others that will take up the position in my place. Even if I don’t make it out of here, it’s not the end for the rebellion. They’re still going to make a new future for everyone.”

“Well, don’t act like you’re giving up!” another said encouragingly. “You’ve still got plenty of time, I can tell. We’ve all experienced for ourselves the kind of motivation you carry in your words, whether you realize it or not. I think there’s a lot more people out there looking forward to seeing what you can do than who’s willing to admit it.”

One across from him nodded. “We might never be able to get out of here, but we all had family we left behind. Someone that we care for is going to be able to see the beginning of a new dawn. I think that’s all any of us could ever ask for.”

Several more of the prisoners gave their mutual agreement, though they fell into silence when a guard walked through the hallway.

The guard stopped right at Lucas’s cell and, as he unlocked it, said, “We have finally received word from the king. The Red Rose is readily awaiting your arrival… and she’s ready to send another rebel into eternal slumber in the name of the king.”