[=10]
It was a rainy night, you know. I still remember looking out at the windowpanes and seeing great droplets of water committing suicide, ending their lives as they had been forced to do. I remember taking one moment as a photograph in my head and keeping it for a while, my reflection looking tired and impatient in the window. I recall the sky that night, black clouds billowing and draping upwards to the velveteen abyss that hung above the rest of the world and I, the pale moon a signal, a mournful warning. I knew it would not be long until my fate was decided.
What you must know about me and the others is that our world is just like yours. Exactly the same, in fact, but the main difference is that in our world, black magic runs amok, white magic is scarce to come by, and our royalty is rather old-fashioned and traditional...at least, it was back then. I believe there have been stories written before about this world - something about a man that worked in a theatre, two friends united then lost, never to remember eachother, nightmares...Part of a dream I had, you know - but in my world, people call my dreams prophecies.
My name is, appropriately, Prophet. I have been a poet all my life and I hope to continue that, with or without my prophetical abilities. But I must be silent about my current state, for a little while.

As I said, it was a rainy night when they came for me. The guards took me, one for each arm, and they half-led, half-dragged me down the stone-walled corridor. I wasn't struggling. I was just too tired to try and walk properly. Prison food is not pleasant and as far as I know it never has been, not here. I closed my eyes as they dragged me, and I tried to summon the poet inside me, the one that I had been known as - but he would not surface. I felt hollow. I felt cold, inside and out. I felt dead already. And I felt even more extinct as I eventually looked up into the stone-cold eyes of the king of our time.