The Last Flame

Chapter 1

I was nothing but a servant boy in the palace of the royals. I thought that I was extremely lucky to be able to work there. I did little jobs in the kitchen in hopes of getting scraps of food or even shelter for the night.

The Chef who ran the kitchen was exceedingly callous. He and everyone else seemed to be especially mean to me because I couldn't speak. I was born mute and have not spoken a word in my entire existence. No one would allow me to say anything anyway, even if I could say something.

They all thought that I was too stupid to speak and that I was diseased. I could hear everything that they said about me but I could never retaliate, as much as I would've really liked to just to see their faces. They hated me for what I was, and they didn't even bother to try to get to know me. Frankly, I started to believe what they were saying about me. Maybe I was just a waste of space, as they sometimes called me when my back was turned.

I was a dark fire spirit, and ever since the war between the element spirits ended in a treaty we have been considered as an infection by some in this kingdom. This kitchen staff was no different than everybody else, including some of my own kind. The king element spirit had created the treaty between the two kingdoms through a marriage with the king of this land and one of the king element spirit's daughters.

The king had been widowed for many years before the war and just wanted peace for his kingdom. This had been before I was born but apparently there was still some prejudice towards the dark spirits since they were thought to have caused the war in the first place. Everyone thought that I was a contamination to the kingdom too.

When I had to live on the street because I couldn't find shelter for the night, which was more often than not, I would try to sleep in the trees to best be covered if it were to start raining while I was asleep. Some mornings I would wake up with little patches of rashes on whatever part of my body had gotten wet during the night. This hadn't happened to my mother whenever she had gone out in the rain. When I asked her why it was happening to me, she had said that it was because I was not wanted so the gods had made it so that I could be easily harmed. My mother scared me.

My mother had left me in an overflowing ditch to die in the rain. The first half an hour or so I had thought that she would come back to get me. But as time wore on I started to lose hope that she was ever going to come back. I managed to drag myself out of the ditch and duck underneath a grove of trees. I was in so much pain from the burning acid feeling of the rainfall that I wasn't too sure that I would make it to tomorrow. I was completely stunned when I woke up the next morning and I was completely healed. Not a single scratch on me.

The very next day after I woke up with no wounds, I was approached by two knights in gleaming armor underneath the very same tree. It was the weirdest thing ever. They had escorted me to the palace and told me that I was going to be working in the kitchen. The way that they said it though made it sound like I didn't really have much of a choice in the matter.

So this is where I'm stuck, and at first it wasn't all that bad. But slowly the bad feelings from the Chef began to trickle down to the rest of the staff. Everyone was scared of him so they did whatever he told them to do without question. The one person who had questioned him didn't come back into work for almost three months. When he did though he was a completely changed man, and not in a good way. Now he never disobeys the Chef.

But the only person who still takes the public beatings were me. It wasn't just by the Chef anymore either. Now everyone would do it at least once a day. A small part of me understood why they were doing what they were doing, but a bigger part of me was wondering how they could? There were so many of them and only one of the Chef. Why didn't they all just stand up against him?