I Burn

Thebes: a place of burning passions, burning emotions, burning insanity, and burning in general. I hate this city, yes, you could call that a burning hate. Everything is burning. Fire in the mind, fire in the streets; Alexander was the spark that set flame to the dry tinder of Thebes. Ever since his complete take over of Greece the people here have resented him, his power, his genius. They built their own pyre with the decision to rebel. What did they expect him to do, allow a powerful city-state to reign free in his newly conquered territory while he went to fight a war against Persia? Alexander is smart, often cruel, but always with a purpose. Thebes is burning for the hindrance they caused Alexander in his conquests. Thebes is a flaming example of what will happen to those who rebel against their new monarch. And I, a loyal soldier, am burning within it.

Chaos, chaos surrounds me. In every direction there is madness. The flames of hate have scorched the despair-wrought minds of the citizens of Thebes; they turn against one another instead of banding together to escape their death. The fires have not yet reached into the middle of the city. I know to head towards the walls is death, but I have to escape the sea of insanity around me. Brawls erupt in front of me; people rob for the sheer sake of plunging into their madness. Women and children scream. Much of this burning desire to kill, rape, and pillage is centered around the sigil on my chest. Alexander; they claim I am Alexander who has come to kill them. Some run. Some fight. Those who fight are weakened by their fear and serve only to slow me in my goal of breaching the walls. Those who fall before me are stripped of all possessions down to their pain wracked bodies and left as tinder for the encroaching fire. Madness; but who can blame them? Flames are eating at their homes, their hearts. Smoke chokes the air, clouding the already questionable senses of the people of Thebes. Who would not lose their sanity?

I remain the sole logical mind in the vastness of this burning signal. Who will look back upon the remains of this pyre and see the single soldier left in the charred remains? I will be taken as a deserter, hunted until the hunters give up and curse me and the family that spawned such deceitful scum. Such thoughts follow me in my quest for the gates. Street after street, all the same, people fighting or cowering. I am the only one with enough hope, or desperation, to try to battle my way through the flames that advance on the city's center. People crowd my vision, one after another; all I see in their eyes is the void of a person to far lost to ever seek redemption. Atrocities have been committed in the history of man, worse than this I'm sure. But as I gaze upon the citizens of Thebes I can not help but to weep.

My goal lay in front of me, the east walls, the last to be set on fire. What lay between me and that gate was twenty-four lines of solid flame. Twelve streets between me and my escape from this burning pit, fit only for the dungeons of Tartarus. Now I hesitate, my journey through the smog filled city flowed unchecked, save for those who wished to fight, now halted in front of the most feared obstacle. The fires that stroke the forge of madness in this city burn bright before me. I stand now beaten iron, ready to be re-quenched in flames. Will I break? Or will I emerge as steel? Will I have the nerve to find out? I smile as that absurd thought brushes fleetingly through my mind. To escape Tartarus you must pass the threefold wall, and cross the river Pyriphlegethon. No dead man has ever escaped the place of punishment, but I'm not dead yet. I enter the fiery flows at a run, my eyes burn, my clothes catch fire. I fall to my knees. I burn.