Sixty Seconds To Midnight

A distant shatter was all I could remember. 

Yet I was torn from what should’ve been my eternal slumber to wander the mortal coil once again.

Blurry, across mountains of my comrades - the stature of a woman.

An enemy who stood for wickedness. One whom I must kill.

Dogged were my senses but I rose from where I fell.

My fingers tickled and eventually wrapped around cold steel.

I took flight, the lack of steel weight carrying me in the wind.

But distant stars collided with the burning horizon.

I felt slow. Weak. The mud beneath me clutched my boots.

Our cries seemed to echo into silence through the ashen air.

The world froze, and I with it.

Distant stars collided with the burning horizon. This is the end.

Our service was done. The ultimate reward was death. 

An eternal reprieve from the struggles and corruption of this accursed land.

The universe released its grasp on us. The anger in her eyes was gone. 

So was the fear, anguish and suffering that contorted her blood-spattered eyebrow.

Though her plated gauntlets still clutched her glinting longsword.

We stood on blood-watered soil not as enemies, but as people.

Loyal soldiers. Casualties on parchment. 

We looked up. We were falling towards the sky. 

Together.

She turned to me, and I to her.

I stared into a single eye, a swirling poison cloud.

I was mesmerised by the beauty behind her acrid, piercing stare.

In the chaos of the battlefield - her helmet was shattered, sitting astray on her skull.

The soldier’s vow in me barked at my conscience. Threatened to rip me limb from limb in the afterlife.

It wouldn’t let me die, knowing that I had broken my code in my final breath.

My free arm twitched. The bones within my fingers cracked as I reached towards her helm.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity.

She flinched, but I was faster.

She gasped, but I was stronger.

I dropped my blade and my steel-clad knuckles wrapped around her crown.

I squeezed. I twisted. Hard.

I looked at her, and her to me.

The sword’s weight slipped through her fingers.

She had unconsciously split the world in two.

There was silence…

…until there was a gentle, reverberating giggle.

She prodded the side of her helmet, now properly fastened to her head.

Now, two clouds seemed to swell behind its metal prison, glitter now sprinkling in its endless pools of acid.

Next, she swung her head wildly. It didn’t budge. Her eyes were perfectly visible, sitting flush within the slit of her visor like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. 

I was expecting to feel a sense of rivening. The hollow twisting of my gut, longing for something fleeting.

After all, I swore fealty to the Queen’s Guardians. 

I serve the true heiress and regent of the Khalverian kingdom.

My orders are to kill those who serve the traitorous princes of the Hand. 

To end their suffering at the hands of the magic that has corrupted their very essence. 

But commands and pledges be damned. Our leaders are not here now. 

Only her and I, standing at the edge of reality as it was swept underneath the rug of existence.

She moved a little closer and raised the gloves to her face, but I gently pressed my hand on her vambrace.

“Don’t you want to see?” she implored, hand on her visor.

I did. I really did. But we didn’t have enough time.

I wish we could’ve had the chance to make proper introductions, but introductions wouldn’t be made regardless. Even if everything was perfect, we would always be each other’s enemy. If not on this battlefield, then the next. 

“I know enough.” I replied, moving my hand onto her own.

Her eyes met mine. As dull as humanity could get. A dark shade between pale, silty soil and rich mud.

Even my armour was lacklustre in comparison to the soldiers of the Hand. Steel plates mounted on steel chains coupled together to sit on leather padding. I blended in with the rest of our numbers.

On the other hand, she seemed to stand proud in her own personal moonbeam. Lustrous silver-coloured plating decorated with golden trimmings that seemed to dazzle, even in the sulfuric smoke that encroached at our feet.

I felt bad. I was nothing that she hadn’t seen before.

My fingers interlocked with hers. The Executor would have my head for fraternisation.

But Father would probably do worse. He used to be a soldier. Loyalty to the crown runs in his veins.

The only hope I had was my sister. We hadn’t spoken since she squeezed my hand and shielded me from my father - the two locked in an endless bout of wailing, crying and screaming. Not since the Fracture that divided the Kingdom’s people in two - not since she had left Father and I to seize the proclaimed “life-changing magical potential” that the Princes had promised to their followers.

I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t want to care anymore.

Tendrils of blackened, unstable essence shattered through the pallid soil. 

We stood on our own island, our hole-ridden raft that barely bobbed above the tides of chaos. 

Dark, voidly tongues slammed at the edges of our world, drawing us closer and closer to each other.

We began to sink into the abyss - the stomach of the world.

She fell to the floor, and I fell with her. 

We lied in each other’s gazes as the mountains above us collapsed into boulders that collapsed into meteors. Fiery rain scalded our bare skin and slowly melted our walls.

She cried as a jagged stone struck her. Her eyes vanished as the helmet came loose once more.

The impact warped the front of her visor shut with scorched, bloodstained steel.

“I can’t see..!”

Through the cracks along the side of her helmet, I watched as the faint glimmer of her eyes darted around the blackened confines that surrounded them - encasing them in a steel coffin to be hidden from the world for what should be until her death. 

But they found me again. My familiar, boring eyes.

I could practically feel her heart slow down again. She seemed… satisfied.

Perhaps mundane wasn’t something she had grown tired of, but something that she longed for once more.

The storm stopped, and the darkness surrounded us. 

My throat went dry as ash seemed to encircle us and our crumbling island.

Now, the mist grew angry. The air began to buzz, crackle and snap at our armour.

“It’s okay.” I told her. “I’m still here.”

I looked at her. She looked at me.

I smiled beneath my steel cage.

I couldn’t see her face but somehow I knew she was smiling back.

If time were still relevant, then our time is now.

The earth shook beneath us. 

Then it was midnight.