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Her right arm lay on the cushioned parapet before her. She raised her hand, and made a slight, quick movement toward the right. No one but her lover saw her. Every eye but his was fixed on the man in the arena.He turned, and with a firm and rapid step he walked across the empty space. Every heart stopped beating, every breath was held, every eye was fixed immovably upon that man. Without the slightest hesitation, he went to the door on the right, and opened it.The princess was overcome by the weight of her decision, even having made it in advance. Her heart had been pounding like drums the size of a round dais, each bang thundering in her ears. Had the princess been foolish? The thought of it made her hands shiver as if cold, not that she had the opportunity to experience the cold the same way her lover did. Every slight tremble growing up had her nursemaids tripping over their own feet like a nervous fawn with thick fur blankets in tow, that once placed upon the princess, would nearly engulf her in heat and weight. It was only when she first took notice of the man that approached her regardless of the vastness of station that stood between them, did she notice the change of seasons in her heart. To say that she was initially charmed by him was the plainest of lies. She did not care for him in the same way that she turned her head away from screams and the snapping and grinding of teeth against bone. But soon the man cupped her in his hands and cradled her into a small candlelight in the blackest of nights, then stoked her into a warm hearth, then in a flash a raging bonfire stood before him that sparked in in complete disorder. Standing too close to her made his eyes parched and skin sting.She loved him possessively, often clutching one of his hands in hers during one of their escapades frequenting the lower town. If such an opportunity arose where the princess could chain the man to her and throw the key into a forge, she would have done it herself.The moment where she stood, her lover yanking open the door, felt sluggish and cold. It was true that she thought over the balance of which her lover stood precariously in a frenzy, she despised both fates that she could guide him towards. Either that path she chose was destined to have her wake up each morn on her lonesome. The sun would forever greet her and wake her up gently with its rays, however it wouldn’t be the one she wished for. The one she wanted. She hungered for her shining star not unlike the ones in the story books that lined her shelf. For the briefest of moments, her hatred for the lady flared up once more before becoming docile once again. She feared not what lay before her any longer because she had already ensured what was to come.The princess grit her teeth and bore onwards, enamoured in this spectacle. It occurred to her prior to this moment in which the orange slowly emerged from the rippling void of light that lurked behind the door, that she should have looked away. It was her intention to. She would never discard the final moments of the man, she would forever keep them to her heart, hers, forever, even if they were the farthest thing from alone.Time dragged on, almost everlasting, until it didn’t.The princess watched enraptured in the slow revealing of events. From distance of where she sat the emotions of the accused were sometimes lost on her, but while she towered over her lover, it was surreal in how she felt like she herself was down in the pit of the arena. She would firmly grasp the cold handle of the door, wooden barred with iron reinforcements. Her hands would tremble, but she would be resolute in every other way. She would know that her lover, in her place would choose what would be best for them. At least that’s what she chose to believe. She knew that the man understood her as much, if not more, than she could herself. If his sure strut towards the door meant not but a display of his sureness and trust in her, she didn’t know what else it could be. Had it not shown that whatever she had chosen, he would have accepted it regardless of the outcome?Yes, she hated the lady, but only as much as she loved the man, because she hated the lady due to her love of the man. The question was not “does she hate the woman more than she loves the man,” but “does she love the man in the same way that he loved her?” That violent gnashing of teeth at the slightest overstep of any threat who tread his way, of the ravenous hunger that churned in her stomach, eerily similar to yearning. Did he love her in the half-barbaric way that made the princess crave her other half the same way a coin could not exist without its other face? But still fight the casting of the mold to change what she was always fated to be? That balance of the coin, of humanity and barbarianism, is what she tipped between. Both were on a scale, but the equilibrium of one scale held heavier sides than the other. Ones consequences mattered more in severity.Her lover did not have that same half-barbarism that lived inside the princess, but he loved her in a way that led him to the other door, knowing full well what crept out, in the shadow that he overcast. In a way that he could accept the die that have been cast for him. Everything else in his nature was defiant, he was never the one to lie there and take the beating, but that’s not what this was. Against what should have been common thought, he blindly followed the hand that beckoned him to the door on the right. He blindly opened the door. He had chosen to trust her, knowing what she was---he chose to open the door knowing what she would do. The princess was anything if not jealous. And so, he chose to not run when the tiger pounced from the bottom of that empty lake of shadow.And in years, when they tell stories of the finest display of love and hypocrisy from royalty, the display of love which sparked dissolution of the class divide, when a half-barbaric princess leaped and dangled off the railings into the pit of an unjust arena, the stories would be of how she pulled her massacred lover, a common man, falling apart and only held together by bone, to her chest. They would sing of how she wailed, her mouth agape, like a banshee. How she scorned her father, cursing him and the lady and every onlooker that watched this horrid display of cruelty. She chastised how they would turn up their noses and cry the fakest of tears in exchange for some coin. She watched as the mourners ceased their weeping for their shock was not one of a seasoned façade. She did not watch as the tiger opened its maw and eventually snapped shut.