Fires roar, people scream.

Chaos is all around me, but the task is clear.

I don’t have time for hesitation.

Mentally locating key points, I set off.

Pip and Leo are helping people to safety, so fighting should be my concern. Blaze kills one of the knights almost instantly with a knife, sliced right through the shoulder of his armor. 

Vincent begins yelling out orders to manage the crowd, and lead everyone still standing to safety. Sir Zantar engages another dark knight and they lock in sword to sword combat.

I consider my options and turn Prince the opposite direction of Zantar and the others, where the face of a familiar embrace waits: the toughest of the bunch, who knocked me into a tree.

He is attempting a happy murder massacre away from the fire, picking on a woman and child. I need to put him down.

Watching the way he attacks them makes me wish I’d ended the job earlier, even if I hadn’t realized the consequences.

I unsheath my new beauty and brace my body for impact.

Either I will hit, or Prince will, there is no way this dark armored knight can escape, especially not while he is too caught up in his rampage to notice.

Prince runs straight for him, and by the time he realizes we are there, it is too late.

One punch from Prince’s hove knocks him down. Recovering from a horse kick to the face was no easy task, believe me.

I win, again.

“Finish him!” a voice roars from the other end of the battlefield.

I look up and see Sir Zantar yelling at me as he stabs at one of the knights atop his horse.

Right, I have to kill him.

I dismount from Prince and walk toward the knight’s downed body. He’s out cold. No movement. Only breathing.

Raising my sword, I prepare to kill.

He’s only a book character, anyway.

He isn’t real.

It isn’t really murder…

I swing it down in one smooth movement and…

Stop.

Right before impact.

I can’t connect the hit.

It’s how I was trained.

Stunt work only ever taught you to fake it.

“Finish him!” Sir Zantar yells again as his sword digs into the space between a dark knight’s armor and his helmet. 

Blood splatters from the knight’s neck before he falls dead.

My grip firms on my sword, ready for a second strike.

This is fine. I just have to do one downward swing and it will all be over.

And yet, the movement stops just as it did before.

Slash!

“See it’s not so hard, Sir Krystal, lady!” Pip squeaks, taking off the knight’s head with a perfect swing.

Thud! Clank!

The head rolls across the pavement, never releasing from inside the dark knight’s helmet.

“I love that sound!” Pip laughs and pats me on the back, “there there, we all have bad days.”

I can’t move. The shock takes over my core.

The knight is dead. Dead as he could possibly be. No one came back from a head disconnected from their shoulders.

This isn’t a stunt, or a scene, or fake blood.

The air didn’t fill with the smell of corn syrup and too much red dye. 

No. Not this time. All I smelled was a strong, metallic odor.

I fall to my knees, unsure of what I am supposed to do, now.

Do I keep fighting? Stay here? How had everything gotten so real?

I wasn’t some warrior. I wasn’t a fighter, or a killer. I was a stunt woman. I wasn’t even the main fucking actor!

“Behind you!” Sir Zantar yells.

Before I can think, instincts take over, and I roll out of the way and to my feet. 

A sword comes down beside me.

One second slower, and my head would have been as lost as the dark knight’s.

I could have died.

I could be killed.

This might just be a story in a book, and the characters might be fake, but what happens if I die here?

No. Can’t think. Thinking only slows me down. Speed is most crucial now. 

I have to treat this like a stunt.

It’s just another stunt.

I could do this. He wasn’t even a real person.

With my sword ready, the knight takes a step towards me and—

Crunch!

My would-be assaulter falls to his knees with a sword sticking out of his throat.

“Oh yea, that feels good!” Blaze says, coming into view, “too bad there aren't more of them.”

There aren’t? 

A quick peek around reveals that, indeed, all five knights are down and the towns folks have started filling back in to help douse the fires.

It’s over? Already?

Thank fucking Matty!

Right about then, someone would normally have yelled ‘cut,’ but not this time. Because as much as I wanted to tell myself it was a stunt, it wasn’t.

“Sir Krystal, a word?” Sir Zantar came my way. He stepped over a pile of corpses. Real corpses.

I mean… were they real? They were story book characters. 

What the fuck even was real anymore?

 I managed to stammer out, “I–Ye–I mean, yes Sir.” My mouth felt dry and wrong. The smell of blood and burning wood congealed in my nose.

“Men, I trust you’ll take care of the rest?” Sir Zantar yelled toward the other knights, but mostly looking at Vincent.

“Yes, Knight Commander, Sir!” Pip, Vincent, Blaze and Leo answered in unison despite being in different places. They went to help with the flames and tend to the wounded.

“This way,” Sir Zantar said, pointing towards a big tree that was a bit away from the dying fires, dead bodies, and townspeople.

I walked behind him silently, not daring to say a word. I had screwed up and I knew it. Every single dead citizen from today was on my hands, book characters or not. This wasn’t what I was trained for.

Stunt people put the safety of themselves and all around them first, and I’d failed at half of that.

“Sir Krystal, is there anything you wish to say to me?” Sir Zantar asked. Despite his intimidating posture, his voice was kind. It didn’t sound like he was blaming me as much as I was blaming myself.

“I’m sorry for my hesitation, Sir Zantar,” I said, honestly. An apology sounded better than, ‘I thought I was filming and that everyone was fake, so I didn’t kill them when I was supposed to.’ 

“I’m not asking for an apology, Sir Krystal. I’m asking if you have anything you wish to say to me,” Sir Zantar repeated himself like he had the habit of doing, but this felt different. He didn’t have the zoned out expression he sometimes got when things didn’t go according to script. 

It made me want to tell him something true. Something real.

“I… have never killed anyone before,” I said, grabbing my emotional support sword, “I don’t think I can.”

Zantar looked at me for a second, but his face changed into a blank one.

I stared at him, halfway hoping he would snap out of it, halfway hoping he would forget about it.

Seconds went by, and then—

“Good talk, fight better next time.” He gave me a heavy pat on the back and then he went back to the others who were now standing, shoulder to shoulder.

I stared at them, and they stared back. Even in their blank, expressionless eyes, I could feel that something was off. There was a rift between us, and it wasn’t the dead bodies or smokey air.

They didn’t even know it, but they felt it.

I wasn’t who they expected me to be.

I wasn’t Tiara.

Tiara had killed left and right since she was a young girl with no question that she was doing the right thing. She did it all to show that a badass woman like her could work up the ranks and wear that shimmering, silver armor she thought was so damn cool as a child.

I’d had my own trials and tribulations to get where I was: years of training in many disciplines, long nights, and bad injuries. But nothing like Tiara would have experienced.

It was clear from how my fellow knights acted that all they saw was Sir Tiara regardless of the name they called me. There was no Jade Sandoval here.

This wasn’t the real world, and yet I felt like the most fake thing here.

“Heeeey, Sir Krystaaaaal, laaaaaaaady! We need your help over here with patching these guys up!” Pip yelled loudly, waving his arms over his head to get my attention.

The show must go on—or rather, the story.

I didn’t have time to pity myself. I needed to end the story as fast as I could and get back to the real world. Once I was gone, I couldn’t mess things up anymore, at least.

Doubt about killing was still on my mind, but for now I could help out the wounded. It was my fault they got wounded in the first place, anyway.

I held my un-bloodied sword tight to me, and walked over to my fake squad in the fake world.

My skills for fake battle could only take me so far in a real one.

I was still alive, and I hadn’t actually killed anyone.

But did it matter? The man was still beheaded in front of me whether I’d done it or not. The end result was exactly the same, even if it was not my blade that did it. It worked out this time, but next time, the hesitation could get someone killed.

I needed to do what Sir Zantar told me.

Fight. Better. Next. Time.