"IF I'M A WITCH THEN HE'S MY BLACK CAT"
"MEOW"
"WTF"
A girl not quite used to living in the city of Tokyo despite living there her whole life. Maybe it's because she was being homeschooled this entire time. On the beaten path, she meets someone new...
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THE COLD, HARD TILE BENEATH my bare skin. I don't even know where I am. Though I don't know where I am, I do hear a thud somewhere close to wherever I'm at and soon enough an oddly warm & thick liquid stains the tile where I lay.
I move my head ever so slightly and I see the emperor. The now decapitated emperor.
Where is his head?
The emperor's concubines let out ear-splitting screams. The men that has taken over the capital move closer to them, grinning at their fear. This makes the girls pupils contract into small dots that look like black beads.
Some stay right where they're at out of pure fear and some try running away into the dark hallway of the palace.
Their sad attempt almost makes me feel pity for them
All the grotesque details. The women that stayed put were spared fornow but the ones that left were quickly followed by some brute guy with tattoos stretching over his entire left arm and a deep scar reaching from the left side of his forehead, over the bridge of his nose, and across his right cheek. I don't remember his face all that well other than his scar and the fact that his face was covered in dirt.
The slimmer guy that stayed behind —rather than the brute one— ending up just tormenting the poor group of women all huddled together looking for a sense a hope. They cower in fear and some fall down from the overwhelming pressure in this current situation.
They haven't noticed me yet
I hear girls scream and a weird splat noise and I know that the concubines who ran away just stained the walls of the palace. And that they won't ever be coming back, ever. Maybe their souls will come back and forever be trapped in the palace.
That's right, I'm in the imperial palace
But how did I get here?
When I breathe, it sounds and feels heavy within this room where a thick tension fills the room like an intoxicating gas that would hurt your lungs if you dare breathe. I try to slow my breathing so it doesn't seem so loud but instead comes out in short little spurts, almost like a hiccup. Or maybe the spurts sound is more like gasping for air or possibly the sound a person makes if they choke on a grape.
Then a man grabs my ankle and I fear that it's one of the people that raided the imperial palace so I slowly turn my head to find that it is just the now fallen emperor's financial advisor. He whispers something while holding my ankle. A cry, a plea, possibly a prayer. His arm had previously been ripped off of his body and now I see that they had also slit his throat in hope of killing him.
He was on the brink of death
The brute man rounds a pillar —scraping his round blade across the pillar to make an eerie sound—, a pillar that the emperor had insisted on making them jade. He makes one final swipe at the jade pillar with his bloody blade, the picking up a random sword off the ground that I believe belonged to the guards that would once stand by the pillars like a watching post. The brute man admired the blade, at how sharp it was, before he twisted the stick of it in his hand and plunged it into the old man.
The man was now dead and his dark, thick blood escaped his body within seconds
I bite down hard on my lower lip to stop myself from letting out those pitiful sounds one makes when they cry.
Wait— am I crying?
The tears don't take long to leak uncontrollably out of my eyes as if they were a waterfall with no beginning and no end, just running water. My tears just seem to have their own piece of mind.
It runs on for what feels like forever
"Looks like we forgot one" the brute guy speaks in a gruff voice, not even breaking a smile at my fear. At least their not complete psychos who would do this treachery because they like the painted look of horror and fear on everybody's faces while their thick blood stains the entire area.
One of the other raiders poked up at the sound of the sound of his colleague "really?" he sounded surprised but then again his voice had been on the higher side this entire time. "I thought I had killed that one already".
"Apparently not" the gruff voice spoke again.
"Okay smart guy" the high pitched guy seems irritated and turns back around to face the scared concubines "and get rid of that head, it's gross!"
The brute complies and drops the head of one of the previous concubines on the floor, rolling a couple feet before stopping. Her face almost looks stuck in a scream as if time had stopped right as she was killed. (Think of the painting 'The scream' by Edvard Munch in 1893 morphed into a female statue).
"Then what do we do with her?" The brute asks looking at my tear stained face and then back at his high-pitched friend.
The high-pitched guy turns back around and examines me in my spot. "Let her live, I don't care about that one" he finally decides, "it wouldn't surprise me though if she didn't make it that far".
So the brute lets me out of his grasp and I collapse back onto the tile, using the scarred palms of my hands as support. Though I do cut my hand on a broken vase on my way up.
A worm above the soil clueless to the vicious bird towering over the poor worm, waiting to bring it home and gobble it up.
I stumble on my way back up from the floor, running as fast as I can manage, pushing my weight into the wide, jade corridors of the palace.
I didn't expect it to be quite this bad. I was hoping to step out of the bloody imperial palace to an area of solace and maybe a sign that could point me in the right direction to the next point in my sad life. But if peace is the right direction then what Tokyo is now is definitely the wrong direction.
Tokyo —not just the imperial palace— has fallen to these new raiders that managed to behead the emperor.
Bodies are everywhere laying in pools of their own blood, still and unmoving, people's homes have been set on fire so the floor boards and wood planks have collapsed and turned to ash by now. Their houses were previously ransacked of all of their most valuable items and all of their life savings.
Not they would notice, they're all dead
Maybe their lingering souls will stay behind and be mad
Collapsed building, the painful lick of the flame that has taken its own residence over Tokyo and the enormous 'mounts of blood that stains Tokyo a deep and dark red.
I have to accept the fate of what Tokyo has now become in order to keep my life. If I allow myself to even have a touch of fear they will sniff me out like hound dogs and eat me alive.
Whether or not it's true, I have to keep going, Tokyo is gone now and there's nothing I can do about it.
