The palace is a monster of diamond and brick, sloping towers, and spiralling turrets, a living, breathing body of wealth and status. The ceremony began when the blue moon hung, quite perfectly in the centre of the sky. Flocks of people began to crowd, each person a mirror of the other one, clothed in white robe and barefooted.

They marched across the streets as if they were an army, processioning towards the palace. A man dressed in pure gold trim and emerald slippers stood before the crowd. The ruler opened his mouth towards his subjects and the ceremony began. “There is a traitor, an escapee from our beautiful society, one who has taken their privilege for granted. I order each and every one of you under the Ruler’s Law to hunt down the traitor, and bring them back to me alive. The one who brings forth the traitor will be rewarded greatly, will be praised.”

A great cheer accompanied the speech, clapping and stomping of feet. Their was a zero tolerance policy for those who disobeyed the rules, punishable by death. Traitors where taken to the great ivory tower, a place of great humiliation. The crowds and citizens flooded to the streets, eager to each win the reward, greedy, blood thirsty.

Every building was ransacked, turned upside-down, as subjects searched for the traitor. But a traitor is a clever word, a clever title to hold up and this traitor knew how to hide themselves.

Buried beneath the great soil, the diamond and emerald mines, the underground food and water stores, was where the traitor hid. Amongst the bones of things since died, safe from the Ruler and his mind-washed subjects that wanted her dead.

It was here that she devised her plan, beneath the earth with only a small candle to provide light. She had escaped from her assigned quarters ripping of the white robes that disallowed any show of personality or character. She had been living under the palace for a considerable amount of time now, eating from the food and water stores, sleeping on the soft dirt.

It was a hard lifestyle but it was better than anything she could have been given above the surface, where people didn’t wear shoes and only obeyed “The Ruler.” Who supposedly gave birth to eternity one hundred years ago. The citizens living in the shadow of the palace believed anything the Ruler told them, including his creation story.

The traitor did not think she was a traitor, she believed she was following her own path, she believed it was her rebellious spirit that kept her alive, her wild side that provided her with determination and her fierce love that gave her hope.