Prince Raymond glanced at his arm. Blood poured out of his bullet wound, staining the expensive Italian suit Tiff had given him. There weren’t many Italian suits left in the world. What a shame.
Quickly reloading his Elephant Gun, Ray looked over the ruined landscape. The once perfect lawn spewed smoke. It was a horrid mesh of scorch marks and craters. Tables were overturned, glasses smashed, and bodies strewn everywhere.
Elizabeth’s parties always went amiss.
A zeppelin burned in the crimson skies above. Careening towards Ray’s pavilion, it threatened to explode. If it exploded, the mansion would burn. That would be such a pity. The mansion was such a quaint place.
“Rally!” Ray shouted.
The few aristocrats still alive mustered behind him, hefting whatever guns they had found in the stash. Ray’s lip twitched when he saw Nevin. Half of Nevin’s mustache burned, turning into powdery ash. And such a lovely mustache too!
The rebels advanced. The steady patter of machine gun fire from the rebel side was punctuated occasionally by agonized screams. A table to the right of Ray shattered as a wave of bullets smashed through.
“Charge!” Ray screamed.
He and the other aristocrats charged forward. A boy next to Ray screamed in a high voice, lifting the flag of the Empire high. For better or worse, the last stand was under way.
A bullet grazed Ray’s cheekbone. He winced as he felt it crack, sending shoots of pain through his eyeball and into his head. For a brief moment he thought he was going to faint.
A huge boom echoed as the zeppelin flew into pieces. Fireballs and white-hot metal laced the skies, lighting the gloomy clouds overhead. Twilight threatened to reach over the brink and throw the day into night.
Raymond knew it was the end. He prepared himself for death and pulled the trigger while he was at it.
A clump of rebels screamed and fell.
Ray smiled with grim satisfaction. Half of his men had been mowed down in the charge, including the boy with the flag. Revenge felt sweet.
“Reinforcements!” Nevin yelled to Ray.
“On which side?” Ray asked, looking wildly about. All they needed now was more rebels trying to kill them.
“Ours! It’s the wizards!”
“Fall back,” Ray ordered. “Let the wizards do their work.”
Wizards rumbled in on their jeeps. Their crisp, grey uniforms were untouched by the battle so far, and energy seemed evident on their faces.
“Lemonade, Sir?” a servant asked.
“Eh?” Ray said. “Oh. Okay. But give some to the men first.”
“As you wish,” the servant said, smiling coldly. “Always as the royalty wishes.”
Ray didn’t trust the way the servant had said that. He twiddled his thin, waxed mustache and wondered whether the lemonade was poisoned.
“Servant!” Ray shouted over the sounds of battle. “Please, come back here for a moment.”
“Has my master decided to take the lemonade after all?”
“You can never trust the quality of lemonade these days,” Ray complained. “Please, if you would, taste the lemonade for me.”
The servant scowled. “It isn’t my place…”
“It is your place when I say so,” Ray sniffed. “Go ahead. Take a sip.”
The servant hesitantly lifted the glass close to his lips. His forehead was beaded with sweat which glistened in the light of the rising moon.
“Are you certain, Sir?” the servant asked.
“Quite. Are you afraid to taste it, perhaps? Is it, perchance, poisoned?”
“No, Your Honor.”
Ray smiled more coldly than the servant. “Then I suggest you take a sip. Quickly, before I bleed to death and completely ruin this suit.”
On the battlefield, the rebels were being crushed with ease by the wizards. The rebels were too afraid to use magic these days, Ray thought smugly. Too afraid to use the more powerful, risky version.
Not that Ray could use magic. As a child, he had struggled over even the simplest of equations. He never could solve for y or x or z. His passion had always been painting and music.
“You will never do magic,” his father had taunted. “You’re nothing but a useless leech of my power. And do you know what we do to leeches?”
“What?” Ray had asked. At the time he had been nine.
“We peel them and squash them. Now run along and play.”
“Excuse me, Sir,” the servant said impatiently, “but there are others to attend to. Will you take the lemonade or not?”
Ray vaguely recalled watching the servant take a sip. “Yes, I would love to have the lemonade.”
As Ray took a sip of his lemonade, he watched the spectacle with distaste. Rebels were blown apart by fireballs and such, spraying nasty stuff all over his once perfect lawn. O how perfect his lawn had been! How much he desired a sunny day and a ride to the Falls to paint! O!…Oh dear. He had gotten quite carried away.
Such things were an unnecessary luxury when you were a prince and you were in the middle of a gigantic civil war. Duty, duty, duty.
Ray scowled and marched forward to the exhausted aristocrats.
“Any serious injuries?” he queried.
“No, Your Honor,” Milo said, smiling through his teeth, “although half the court was mowed down. I wonder if Limsky would have let that happen…”
Ray stepped forward and stood tall.
“Milo, Limsky was in that zeppelin. Limsky is dead.”
Milo ground his jaw, searching for the right words. Ray knew that Milo hated him and that, if Limsky ever decided too rebel, would side with Limsky immediately. Nevertheless, he was a superb architect and engineer. The government needed him.
The air beside the group turned hazy, forming into the shape of a man. The area pulled strongly at the aristocrats, as if it had stronger gravity than Earth. Light bent, dust gathered, and, finally, Limsky appeared.
Limsky’s suit smoked. His hair was ruffled, and his sideburns were nearly burned to a crisp. One of his hands was bloody.
“Did I miss anything?” he asked, grinning in a childish, lopsided way.
“No,” Ray said, trying to sound warm. “Your wizards arrived just in time. And my father? Is he safe?”
Limsky raised an eyebrow and looked up at the stars, mostly shrouded in smoke. When he looked back, steel was set in his expression.
“The rebels outsmarted us,” he said calmly. “The assassin was just a distraction. The driver, as it turns out, was the real assassin.”
“And is the assassin dead?”
“Yes sir,” Limsky said, cheering up. “He was about as good an assassin as a butterfly--a real low-rank wizard.”
Milo was turning red in the face. He looked at Ray with such hatred, Ray nearly took a step backwards.
Then it hit him.
His time chasing after girls and Italian suits was over.
Prince Raymond was now the emperor.
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