The Princess Assassin

The Golden Serpent

Jasmine, a princess assassin, knows no boundaries. She fights faster and fiercer than a lion, runs swifter than a cheetah, and prowls more silently than a leopard; making her the most dangerous assassin in the whole Red Desert. She is so formidable that one cannot say her name aloud without trembling in fear. No one dares say her name, so they call her The Golden Serpent. No one has seen her and survived. The only place she shows her face is in the Assassins Keep, the beautiful but dangerous-looking fortress on the monstrous dune overlooking the large city of Agrabah. Stories say she is a beautiful woman with eyes of gold and long ebony hair. She prowls the streets at night, cutting down thieves and greedy men stalking women down the alleyways. 

Not much is known about this assassin, but one thing is for certain: NEVER attempt combat with her. You are guaranteed your guts spilled on the cobblestone street in less than a minute.

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  Jasmine maintained a cool detachment to her targets. Mostly she preferred not to think of them, but when she did it was as if they were already dead — walking meat bags waiting to be dispatched to the butcher. She thought of them as meeting their destiny, and she was merely the conduit. Everyone has to die sometime, and she considered it a good way to go. No illness, no drawn-out goodbyes. They were just happy and oblivious one second and gone the next. Simple. Convenient. Painless. Jasmine took no satisfaction in the killing, but she took pride in getting a clean kill. She had a reputation to maintain and scores to settle.

The clock struck twelve, time to move.

Jasmine stands at the edge of the wall, nothing other than the noise of the flags flapping in the wind covering all traces of sound. Rising from her low crouch, The Assassin surveys the dark city underneath her. She needs no light to hunt in this city, she has the place memorized like the back of her hand.

Starting with the citadel, she slinks around the enormous castle walls, pausing every so often to scan her surroundings. She has the shifts of the guards memorized, so she can slip into the castle unnoticed. But tonight, that is not her mission. Her mission is not to kill, but to save. Save someone dearly important to her, the only weak chink in her armor: Aladdin. He has just been sentenced to death for opening that big mouth of his to complain about the Sultan in public, so the guards are to arrive for his arrest at dawn. She must escape with him to the Assassin's Keep: the only place the Sultan's Guard refuses to go. There, he will learn to train like the others to become a killing machine.

Jasmine suppresses her laugh into a tight-lipped smile. Aladdin, the bumbling, lanky boy becoming an assassin? Now there was a joke. He thinks he has the stealth and quickness of a thief, but getting caught every time is his forte. 

The assassin darts across the alleyway and into the dead market, tents tall and looming against the full moon. Jasmine learned it was easier to get caught in a full moon than a new moon, so she'd have to take her time tonight.

But she didn't want to take her time. She wanted to get Aladdin and hide him in the safest place ever known to man. She wouldn't admit it, but she loved the awkward gangly boy more than she should. As her instructor Zander Fayde once said, "Love no one. The ones you love will be used against you. When you love, you become risky and vulnerable, and an assassin cannot be that!"

Jasmine knew what he meant now. When Zander told her this, she was confused because she never loved and never knew how one would feel when in love. But now she knew. Love made you lightheaded and giddy, risky, free. 

But now Jasmine did not want to be in love. Love gave her a weak point, one that someone can shoot her down with. She needed to be indestructible. She needed to be the assassin everyone feared: the sly shadow that leaps upon the unsuspecting, the formidable monster that prowls their streets by moonlight.