The Royal Prisoner Chapter 1
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The Royal Prisoner
Chapter 1
On the 26th of October 2086, around 2 in the morning, a loud explosion was heard throughout the harbour of Heraklion, on the island of Crete.
17 years old Prince Victor, brother to Emperor Hector III of Corsica, suddenly woke up confused and worried. The young prince looked around him while panting, he slowly remembered that he was in Heraklion's Fortress, where his brother sent him a few weeks prior, for his safety.
Prince Victor straightened up in his bed and thought he simply had a bad dream when his heart skipped a beat.
Gunshots, inside of the fortress.
Victor wasn't imagining it, something was seriously wrong. His bedroom door was slammed open and a few guards stormed inside with dazed expressions and wide eyes.
"Your Imperial Highness, we need to evacuate immediately!" A guard announced with a loud shaky voice. Victor anxiously jumped out of bed and hurriedly ran to his wardrobe to get dressed. The guard roughly grabbed the teenage prince's forearm and pulled Victor with him. "We have no time for that, Your Highness!" The guard said before rushing the prince outside of his bedroom.
The panicked prince followed the guards escorting him into the stairs. Gunshots indicated that a fight was still going on within the fortress, even though the prince had no idea what was actually going on.
"Quick, follow me!" The guard leading the way exclaimed as he heard footsteps getting closer. The prince and the other guards followed him inside of a large kitchen. As they entered the room, they heard the footsteps accelerating and hurriedly hid behind the large wooden island.
A guard looked at Victor with fear in his eyes and gestured at the young prince to stay silent. The prince jumped with surprise when he heard the kitchen door being slammed open.
Victor was trying to control his breathing and be as silent as humanely possible as he heard the boots of whoever just entered the kitchen right on the other side of the wooden island. The young prince's heartbeat was so fast he was worried the intruder could hear it.
Victor looked at the guards sitting on each of his side and saw that they too were frightened. They were older than him, of course, but were still quite young, and Victor tried to picture what was going on inside of their head.
Suddenly, another intruder walked into the kitchen and the Prince's hand tightened into a ball with adrenaline.
"All clear. Let's keep going." One of the intruders exclaimed, panting. "Rebels!" The young prince thought with a disgusted pout after recognizing their Corsican accents.
"We need to move!" A guard declared after the rebel's footsteps vanished. The prince nodded and silently stood up before tiptoeing out of the kitchen.
The prince apprehensively followed the guards towards the exit, making a silent prayer to get out of the fort without being caught. Once more, Victor and his escort narrowly avoided rebel soldiers by hiding behind a wall and praying for their negligence.
The gunshots had stopped, which the prince hoped didn't mean that the rebels secured full control of the fort, in which case they would soon run out of luck with all these rebels focused solely on finding the young prince.
"This way!" A guard exclaimed with a spark of hope on his handsome young face. Victor felt a droplet of sweat running along the line of his blond curly hair and nodded energetically. The group sneaked through the unguarded wooden door and finally arrived on the long pier that connected the old venetian fortress to the city of Heraklion.
They had nowhere to hide now, as the pier was naked of anything that would cover them.
"Run!" A guard shouted, pointing at something above them. The prince quickly turned his head and the blood drained from his face as three rebel soldiers were looking right at them.
After a moment of hesitation from both sides, the young prince darted forward and started running for his life. One of the rebels grabbed his gun and pointed it at the group but his officer roughly snatched it from his hands.
"Hold your fire, you bloody idiot!" The rebel officer shouted at his subordinate. "He is here, the prince is here, on the pier!" The officer then screamed on top of his lungs.
As Victor ran away from the fort, convinced that he was going to make it. Suddenly, a group of rebel soldiers ambushed by the other end of the pier jumped on the princes' way, mere meters ahead of him.
The out of breath prince froze, his eyes wide and his head spinning, and shot a quick glance behind of him.
They were cornered.
It was over.
"Your Highness." A rebel soldier called Victor in the early evening as he was awakened from his nap. The prince straightened up; memories of the last night abduction still vividly present in his mind. He moodily looked back at his two captors and shot the one that woke him up a death stare. "We have docked in Jaffa."
The young prince was escorted outside of the rebel warship he had been evacuated from Heraklion in and sat into a rebel military car.
Victor looked around him and caught glimpses of the busy port of Jaffa. Although he tried to hide it, the young prince was frightened and wondered what his future held for him and what the rebels planned to do with him.
A prince doesn't put on a show, doesn't make a spectacle of himself, his father often told Victor, and so the prince was cautious to look calm and detached whenever his captors looked back to check on him. The prince's hands were damp with nervousness however, and his stomach was painfully knotted.
As the military car drove off, Victor's eyes wandered outside of the window and absorbed the Mediterranean landscape, not so different from the one in Corsica or Crete. Rapidly, it turned into a more arid and desolated land, and although the prince was fascinated by these unknown and exotic smells and colours, he knew that he was getting close to his destination.
Jerash was a Jordanian town, built thousands of years ago and home to impressive ancient Roman ruins. This little town was also strategically located and had been chosen by the Corsican empire to be the regional capital.
Now that the rebels fully controlled the region, they established their Far East headquarter in the former's governor's palace, in front of which Prince Victor's car had just stopped.
The anxious and confused young prince was led inside of the headquarters and taken to a room where rebel officers were currently gathered standing around a wide oval table, in the heat of what seemed like a serious strategic meeting.
"It looks like our guest of honour has arrived." The highest ranked officer in the room sneered with a smirk. From his uniform, Victor immediately noticed that he was a general. The general was a young man, in his late twenties, and displayed a cocky insufferable smile. He dismissed his officers with a hand gesture and the prince was soon left alone with him. "Do you know who I am?" The general asked Victor while walking closer to him calmly.
"Should I?" The prince dismissively lied. Of course he knew who General Hadrien Ciabrini was, you would have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the rebellion young genius. Despite his young age, the general already had an impressive military record and was successful in delivering several humiliating camouflets to the imperial troops. The general chuckled and looked back at the prince with contempt.
"Such an arrogant little boy." The general replied. "No wonder your wimp of a brother ended up causing this war. I can tell you two are of the same breed." He added with disgust. The prince shook his head in disbelief, never someone dared to speak to him like that in his short life.
"At least I'm not the breed of a traitor to Corsica!" Victor spat out with anger.
"Corsica?" The general replied with wide eyes. "Corsica existed before your miserable family reigned, and will exist long after, I'll see to that." He concluded. "Guards!" He then called before the door opened and soldiers walked in. "Take His Imperial Highness to my quarters." He commanded before dismissing them.