Her heart began beating wildly in her chest, her hands slamming against the windows again and again — she didn’t notice that her fingers were bleeding.
The soldiers in the room had started backing away slowly as she threw her body against it when her hands failed her. She screamed, haunted, breaking sounds.
“Mikhail!”The glass cracked. She threw her body against it, a glass fragment cutting her forehead.
“Mikhail!” Another thud, another crack. One of the soldiers dropped his weapon and left. She was possessed. The shackles around her wrists started to bleed. She was the ghost of her demons.
“Mikhail!” Another thud and the glass shattered. Her body was bleeding in places where the glass had ripped at her, but she didn’t feel it. The iron gates were open.
People were grabbing for him, desperate to pull him apart. From the open window, she could now hear the chaos and the din of the crowd unbuffered. They were mad. Her father was controlling them all like the ringmaster he was.
Mikhail’s body disappeared amongst the people. Anastasia was in a frenzy, half hanging out of the broken window as she released a blood-curdling scream.
It was an earth-shattering, world-ending kind of sound that haunted the soldiers who heard it for the rest of their lives. It was a broken woman at the edge, being reborn. Anastasia’s vision reduced to a single point, the last place she had seen Mikhail’s body disappear into the people.
Her scream continued, rippling over the night sky — when suddenly, the earth shook and the windows of the Winter Palace facing the street shattered.
The sound came in a bang, lights flickering out while some exploded in bright bulbs of light and smoke. Fires started in some of the dark rooms with broken windows, sending the entire scene further into chaos.
The Tsar looked up; his eyes fixed on Anastasia’s window. He saw her, half hanging out of the windowpane, bloodied and screaming for her lover.
The irons that he had specially made were glowing hot around her wrists but did not seem to be burning her, and if they were, she did nothing to betray it.
Her eyes were centered on the crowd, her magic sending a shockwave over the palace that shattered the windows. He stumbled back, falling down the steps as he looked up at the half-ruined palace.
The crowd had gone silent for only half a second before the screaming began again.
“It’s an act of God!” Someone cried, their voice laced with panic.
“We’ve chosen wrongly!”
“This man is innocent!”
“We should have taken the Tsarina!”
Echoes started to ripple through the crowd, no one noticing Anastasia as the soldiers finally got their wits about them and yanked her back inside.
All they saw was the blood on their hands as the glass rained down on them like a new wave of a plague.
Anastasia was ripped from the window, crying and bellowing out for another sight of Mikhail. She refused to believe that he was dead even as her nose bled and her head ached from the sudden outburst of her magic.
My magic!Her eyes went wide as she pushed against the soldiers who were still acting like they were afraid to touch her for too long.The chains my father had made…
They don’t work.The voice inside of Anastasia’s head was not her own. She started looking around the room like a woman possessed, searching for the woman’s voice.
“Asya?” She cried out, looking crazed. “Asya!”
One of the soldiers dropped her arm. “I’ve had enough of this,” he backed away, making the sign of the cross. “She’s possessed!” His comrades agreed with him, and they fled.
I’m here, child.Asya’s voice returned.Those shackles will never work. Your father tried to invoke magic he knows nothing about.
Anastasia fell to her knees, weeping softly into her hands. “What do I do? Mikhail —“
Take the shackles off, Anastasia.Asya’s voice rang clear as anything she had ever heard.Free yourself.
The voice went away, fading out softly, just as abruptly as it had come into Anastasia’s awareness. She looked around the empty room and down at the chains around her wrists.
She held all of her focus on them, imagining herself free of the restraints. She felt herself rising above everything that had ever happened to her.
