Alignment - Prologue

She used to love this dress.

It was her lucky dress. It was the dress she was wearing when Axil first kissed her, the dress she wore when she first beat her sister in a running race, the dress she wore when so many good things in her life had happened. So on that fateful day – the day her world ended, she thought she should wear it. Taking a gun into the viceroy’s apartments and shooting him was not an easy thing to do. She needed all the luck she could get.

It turned out to be the unluckiest dress in the world.

She fingers the lace at the elbows, lace that used to hang in such elegant folds. She loves the way the pink satin faded into the intricate patterns, framing her flat wrists. Her sister hates the style, calls them “cobwebs.”

Perhaps the dress is still pink. It is hard to tell in the half-light of the prison cell, she sees nothing in the blackness. Her waste is removed by the system every hour, food appears through the floor three times a day. She’s been keeping track of the days with those three meals that appear with such astonishing regularity. They remind her that she has been here a week, two, three, four, five, six, seven, a whole moon cycle, another week. They remind her that the autumn would now be stretching out long golden hands over her homeland.

She has spent the eight weeks listening to the guards outside her cell. She only catches murmurs at a time, but the meaning in so many of those murmurs is clear. ‘At harvest festival. Sundown.’

Harvest festival. That time when all sacrifices all over the planet were made. Of course her uncle would see it fitting. Her sister too, no doubt. She would sit on some platform with her pretty boy husband and her fan and laugh merrily as they shot her little sister.

Maybe they would decapitate her instead. Or suffocate her. It varies according not to crime, but to how the viceroy feels on that day.

She feels sick. Her food lies wasting to itself in a corner. She knows what day it was today. The end is near, far too near.

And shortly after the last meal, she knows, the sun goes down outside. They will be here any minute and she has one goodbye to make, the only goodbye she can make.

She drags herself up against a wall, thankfully dry thanks to the ventilation of these tiny old underground rooms. “Axil?” she whispers. “Are you there?”

There is scraping on the other side of the wall, she knows he is crawling over to meet her- or meet her as best he can. “I’m here,” comes his voice, always so low and reassuring. She presses her cheek against the cold wall, imagining it is his warm brown chest, smelling of his soap.

“Axil, I’m so scared.”

“They won’t hurt us, Val. They won’t. You’ll be safe. You’ll be fine. I’ll protect you.”

It is a lie, but he doesn’t know any better. He was never as good a listener as her, he never heard the nuances her nannies had taught her to listen for, the cadences in speech and the meanings in words that the speaker did not imply. She breathes in deeply, shuts her eyes to what is left to see in the cell, though in the past near eight weeks she has explored every inch of these walls, has them memorised, printed on the insides of her eyelids. Not to mention the decaying skirts, the satin turning grey and brown on the edges from dirt and mould and age and who-knows-what.

Not long now. For her or the dress.

“I love you,” she says. Her voice has not sounded this small in years. She has been emulating her sister’s way of talking since she was twelve. She has learnt to feign confidence and show others that they can trust her.

But when the trials came, they didn’t believe a word she said. Not when her sister said it all so much better.

Now she has so little time for anything left, let alone clever words. She emits a sob instead, scrabbling at the wall, wishing there was a way through to touch Axil, to look into his nut-coloured eyes one more time.

“I love you too. You know that. I always have and I always will.” His voice is calm and steady. She knows that he is not lying this time. She breathes more, inhaling the sweet scent of home air, thinking how much she will miss it, how much she will miss him, how much she will miss life.

There is the sound of something on the keypad outside her cell. A palm being scanned. Then the heavy triple-strength slam doors (what do they expect of her, a tiny starving princess-girl? She is not a monster nor a machine) open. She squints against the full light of freedom to see the green-armoured soldiers.

“C’mon, Your Highness,” one says as they lift her up unceremoniously by an arm each. “Time for you to go.”

“Val?” Axil shouts from beyond the wall. “VAL!”

“Shush, you traitor!” One of them bangs the wall hard with his fist as if the wall were a pillow, moving on behind the two holding her.

She has imagined this moment many times since her imprisonment, knowing it would come eventually. So many times she envisioned herself climbing proudly up onto the platform. But after the dark of the cell, even the sunset is too bright and she has to squint. Her legs are weak under her. The guards all but drag her onto the stage. All elegance, all pride, all training vanishes. She is just a traitor princess, a would-be murderer being led to her comeuppance.

There are crowds. Noisy crowds. But whether they cheer or ridicule her, she cannot tell. She is too tired to tell. Truthfully, she has never been so tired in her life. Maybe death will be a relief.

Her uncle is smiling at her, dressed in festival finery with his brown-grey hair slicked back. With relish he unscrolls the piece of paper a clerk hands him.

“Valonie Drigelda Treveno, you have committed the crimes of attempted murder, conspiracy and high treason and thus you have been sentenced to death by sword.” Sword. A sharp, quick laser stroke to the neck. Pain free. At least that is one good thing. “You have a moment now to make your peace before your life is terminated.”

The sky is pink. So beautiful. How ironic that her life will end at sundown. Not just because it is the end of day too, but because she hated it in life, much preferring to climb out on the platforms with Axil and Saela and watch the sunrise. Saela was her sister, Axil was her sweetheart, and they were each other’s best friends. The three of them were never meant to be apart.

But Val is about to die, Axil is rotting in the dungeon and Saela is here. Sitting on the platform as Val imagined. Sae is without her husband, and she has made a bold choice to wear black. She is a shadow on stage compared to the oranges and reds clothes like licks of flame around her.

Sister’s eye meets sister’s eye. Val looks away before Sae has the chance. Instead she looks at her uncle, waiting for her to make her last pleas for mercy. He is wearing his usual sneer, now smug and victorious.

Val spits at his feet. A new surge goes through the crowd, but again it is impossible to discern support from disgust.

They wrestle her down, putting her cheek against the red marble of the block.

Valonie shuts her eyes.

This is largely unchanged since 2011, just some minor edits done on sentence structure etc. But let me know what you think :)