“No one is better than anyone else.”
Superman* #quote
CJ's coming over tomorrow so that'll be fun. Hopefully there won't
be another ninja incident. Anyway onto the flash fiction!
The Conquered
Cliff the servant boy stood in the hall while he looked outside to
see the stables, warehouses and barracks burning. He tugged nervously
at the fancy suit he wore while soldiers fought in the courtyard and
blood spilled. He didn't own the suit, or own anything really. Cliff
lived only barely a step above a slave. Maybe. The distinction was
blurry considering the royalty never called him by name and he used
what little money he got to buy the same amount of food a slave would
get.
That day the invading army of Helrun broke through the city walls
and poured through the streets, heading to the castle. Helrun's army
was five times the size of the his nation's of Galli, and only a
seige allowed them to last a week.
Cliff felt his full head of black hair. When his best friend and
elder Raymond was sentenced to be executed he said to Cliff, “Watch
how you act and maybe you'll live long enough to have all your hair
fall out before you annoy a royal enough to be executed.”
When the Helrun army entered the castle the rattling of the armored
feet echoed through every wall. Eventually a squad of soldiers ran
across Cliff. Several of their swords dripped with blood while some
didn't hadn't touched flesh yet, but could at any moment.
“I'm only going to ask this once, surrender.” The soldier at the
front of the squad said in a plain voice, like a bored actor reciting
a line in rehearsal. The royalty of Cliff's nation kept the people
uninformed of the circumstances of the war. Though the Helrun
invaded, they started the war, hoping to pillage some small villages
on the outside of the large Helrun kingdom with little resistance.
But Helrun, a democratic state, values its individual citizens more
than Galli and went to war over the incident. The Galli covered this
truth up. Helrun has a policy of assimilation with everyone they
fight, giving an option for surrender for every individual. The
reason only the castle barracks, instead of the whole city burned.
Cliff considered the offer without the truth. With a lie that the
Helrun invaded on their own. He didn't have much time to consider the
offer, as the soldiers desired to find the royalty of Galli before
they escaped. Cliff remembered his life as a servant to the Galli,
and his friend Raymond's execution, caused by the moderate annoyance
of a royal.
“I surrender,” he replied to the squad leader. “The royals
have a hidden passageway to exit the castle. You go left, right,
right, left from here to get to it.” Cliff had seen the King use it
for his many affairs.
In the following months Galli fell. With no heirs it became part of
the Helrun nation and Cliff became the apprentice of a smith and
eventually gained his own wealth, independence and family.
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