SOLO ELITE THE GREAT AWAKENING

“OK, this is your stop,” whispered Adam.

I hugged Adam and quickly kissed his lips and made my way through the tree line. I looked back for a second, and Adam was touching his mouth, his face a bright red. I took a deep breath and stumbled out from behind the bushes and into plain sight of the Swine. There was no turning back now. I could see them, and they could see me. In the distance I heard laughter, and it was growing by the numbers. When I approached the city gates, the men gathered around me, laughing hysterically.

One of the men spoke up and said, “You have got to be kidding me. This is your grand entrance? I knew you were coming, but I was half expecting to see you flying in, Robin. Take her away.”

The man shooed me away. With a bright flash and searing pain deep in my skull, my world became dark, and I was escorted in a daze.

I woke up with a trickle of blood down my face and to the sound of horses trotting. The smell of rust and damp wood clung to my nostrils and crept its way into my throat. The Swine had put me in an iron cage just tall enough to lie down in and anchored to a wooden trailer by leather straps. The reality of being captured finally set in, and suddenly I felt very small and powerless and at the full mercy of the Swine.

As we rode into town, the other men looked at me as if I were a valuable prisoner who had escaped and had now been captured and returned. I was an exotic species being brought back for display and then to be slaughtered as a trophy. We passed rows of barred windows and, standing behind them, were people with faces of hopelessness, yet people who desired peace. Their eyes followed mine as I passed them and tried to not look so distraught.

I watched as large wooden doors opened and slammed against the stone walls, vibrating the gray ash out from every crevice. The chilled air rushed over my body as we entered a different section of the city through a cold, dark and damp tunnel. We came to stop in a large room filled with the prisoners from Kenosh. Slowly as they gathered around my cage, they began to whisper and point. For a moment I shut my eyes to rest them, but I was awoken by a voice near my face that startled me.

“Is it true? Is it true what people are saying?” a man said, his voice trembling. “Are you the Robin the prophecies speak about? Surely you must have some sort of great importance to them for the Swine to lock you up in this way.”

“I have no answer for why they caged me. I am merely a peasant who was lost and stumbled upon this place looking for help.”

“Get out of here!” screamed a guard, nudging the man with his foot.

The prisoner fearfully nodded and lowered his head, releasing his grip from the bars of my cage before disappearing into the crowd. The guards disconnected the trailer from the horses and wheeled me into a separate empty dark chamber beside the other prisoners. The men undid the leather straps that held the cage to the trailer and then lifted the front of the trailer up so that my cage could tumble out. I gritted my teeth and braced for impact, but luckily I only slid down to the floor, and my cage slowly flipped forward into a pile of loose hay.

The guards laughed and left as their voices faded. In a daze my eyes focused across the room on the movements of the shadows coming from the bottom of the door. I had grown tired and must have fallen asleep because the shadows began to rise like billows of smoke and then morphed into a growing figure. Paralyzed in fear, I watched as a man formed before me, as if a small cyclone had entered my cell. His body was made of swirling smoke, and his face looked like smoldering coal shielded by a golden mask that was blank with no detail. When he spoke, it was like the sound of water being poured on a burning log.

“Greetings, Robin. I am La Cinder. I am king here and will continue to be as long as I feed my appetite for the broken spirits of the diseased. How do I plan on doing this, you ask? If I take away their one and only hope—you—they will die and forfeit their lives to me. Not their souls, no. Their energy that was in them. The energy that lives in every living creature.”

Afterward I must have slept for hours because midnight had come. I was awoken when a pebble hit my arm. “Adam? How did you get in here?”

Adam was standing there by the door with his finger to his mouth and motioning for me to follow him. Hugging the walls, we snuck past the sleeping guards, trying to stay clear of the light from the torches. My foot came down on the tail of a rat that let out a loud screech. Adam and I darted into a dark corner and hid behind a wooden barrel.

“Adam, how did you get in here?” I whispered.

“Never mind that. We were watching from a treetop as you surrendered to the Swine and noticed that, moments later, they had taken your wings and raised them on the tower on the rooftop of this building for the others to see.”

“The old or new wings?”

“Well, it definitely was the pair of wings Abigail made you. I don’t know how but they have them.” Adam paused for a moment. “Phillip, that scum. We need to get to the roof and get those wings, so the people can see that you are here and alive, to restore their faith.”

“Over there,” I whispered, pointing to a spiraling staircase. The old wooden stairs creaked as we made our way to the top, when, without warning, one of the wooden planks broke beneath my foot. Luckily my front foot was planted on a solid board, and I avoided falling.

“Are you OK, Robin?”

“Yeah, I fine. Let’s just try to spread our weight out, OK?”

Adam nodded, and we continued to the top of the staircase, coming to a dead end, but finding a corrugated steel trap door in the ceiling.

“Wait, do you hear that?” I asked, pausing, not moving.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Someone’s coming,” said Adam, turning to me with glassy eyes.

Turning back around, I pressed on the hatch and tried my best not to make any noise. I slowly lifted it enough so that I could slide through onto the lip of the roof. I held the door open wider for Adam and slowly lowered it after he was beside me, softly pressing down on the door until I heard a click of the latch.

“Here, this should buy us some time,” said Adam while threading a piece of steel wire through a hole in the door before binding it to the roof.

“Now that’s using the old noggin.”

Without hesitating, Adam scaled the rickety tower as it swayed from side to side.

“Hurry, Adam. They are trying to break through!”

“I got it! Here, catch!”

The wings sailed to the ground, making a loud thud, like an old baseball glove hitting the ground. I could see the old wings were underneath the new ones, so I tore off the wings made from the leaves and bracelets, and quickly put on the feathered wings. Adam jumped down to the rooftop and immediately put his hands in the air.

A familiar voice behind me spoke up. “Fine, fine, have it your way. Keep the wings. It really makes no difference to me. In the morning you will be executed in front of all these pathetic people,” said La Cinder.

The guards grabbed Adam first and led him back down the stairs. Standing there behind La Cinder was Phillip with a smug look on his face, applauding.

“Great job, really. I mean, I went through all this trouble to soil any hope of your return.”

“Why? How could you do this to your people? What’s in it for you?”

“My people? They don’t understand me, my dreams! My wants! For years now we have been picked off like ticks from a rabid dog, and I, for one, was not going to put the blade to my neck. So, like the ole song goes, if you can’t beat them … well, you know the rest.”

Philip was standing there, grinning from ear to ear as I was escorted off the roof. “Let go of me!” I screamed, jerking away my arm from the guard’s hold. As I approached the stairwell, Philip addressed me and sarcastically bowed. I balled my fist and threw it into his nose and screamed, “Phillip, you are a disgusting little worm!”

The guards laughed as Phillip clutched his nose and bent over in agony.

They threw me in a cold and dark, dingy jail cell crawling with maggots that smelled like horrible rotting meat. The room had served as a place for the Swine to throw their trash and leftovers, but now it served as a makeshift prison for the leader of the ones who had rebelled against them. I was scared, and my stomach was growling constantly from hunger, but the smell here put me on the verge of throwing up. I struggled to see through the dark to confirm if I was alone when movement again caught my attention.

My eyes slowly adjusted to my surroundings, and an outline of a door was in front of me. A silhouette of a man appeared behind the bars.

“Excuse me, O Great One, I mean, Your Highness,” he said in a sarcastic way.

“Yes?” I said, with a tremble in my voice. I stood up, and I approached the man. The smell of alcohol cut through the air as I drew closer, making my face cringe.

”You know, we have been waiting for you for some time now? That’s right. We knew about you before you even knew about you.”

Trapped like a mouse, there was nothing more in the world that I wanted than to just go home and hug Mama. Maybe it was the exhaustion or the fear of dying, but suddenly I stopped believing that I was the savior for these people who have been waiting and relying on me, so I said what I thought would get me home. “Sir, please, these people think I am someone I am not. I am just a scared little girl, wanting to go back home.”

“Aw, sure. Well! Why didn’t you just say so?” the man said, jiggling the keys near the lock. My heart stilled as I was in shock that the line had actually broke through to this man.

“Ha! You stupid fool. Did you think it would be that easy? That you were just gonna walk out the door with a few sappy lines?”

The man turned and walked into the dark hall.

“Wait, please!” I grabbed the bars and shook them with all my might as the tears flowed down my face. The man appeared once more.

“Dear girl, whether or not you are who they say you are, you are a tool to disable whatever is left of the rebels who go against La Cinder. The first order of business was to do away with your little loudmouthed boyfriend, Adam. He seems to have taken a liking to you with the way he was so quick to defend your name as my sword plunged deep in his chest!”

“No! Not Adam! Why? He was innocent and didn’t deserve to die!” My knees buckled, and I slumped down by the door. All I could think about was the guilt of being the cause of Adam’s death. He had believed in me, even to the point of death. My mind raced. How could I continue to let this happen? I was no one special. My head fell between my knees, and I cried myself through the night until the next morning.