A/N: 'Twas the night before Schooltide and all through the house, not a creature was stirring apart from my mouse.

I'm back to full-time education soon, and I was going through my stuff when I remembered my English GCSE coursework from ages ago.

It was bloody miserable.

I remembered this because I've just posted a fic that had 'Humour' as a category and you can't risk writing something funny for an exam (as evidenced by my English SAT results a few years ago).

But anyway, I got to thinking that for my coursework a while ago I wrote some fanfics for the creative writing section. I got away with it because they were thoroughly depressing and therefore eloquent and worthy of the 100% they got!

So I thought, 'why not post them here?', and I think I will as soon as I can get my hands on them. In the meantime, Depressing Drabble Series!

#1 - Part one of an angsty retelling of the Freylin arc.

Because I Adore Freylin Angst For Some Reason Even Though I Thought I Loved The Characters Too Much To Hurt Them But Am Secretly Some Kind Of Sadist When It Comes To My OTP And The Feels I Associate With Them And Their Tragic End

OR

Star-Cross'd Lovers

Once upon a time, there was a boy.

He had black hair and blue eyes and magic. He was a sweet child who was well brought up by his long-suffering mother, who taught him what he needed to know in order to survive in the world. He heeded her lessons well, for there were always examples for her to draw on in those dark days, but the boy was kind and innocent and incapable of believing in his heart that he would ever truly need the knowledge of the harsh world. He listened and obeyed when the fire was dying and the nights were cold, but when the morning came he often forgot the tales of cruel men and death and betrayal and hatred and tragedy.

He was only a boy, after all.

Before long, the boy had grown from a skinny, pale child to a skinny, pale adolescent, towering a foot above his poor mother. His magic had grown too, and it was almost too powerful for him to control. So, his mother sent him away to the only place where her son could learn to master his gifts: the one place in all the world she had taught him to fear above all else. She packed his bag and waved him off, blinking back tears as she prayed he would not be discovered. The boy did not notice her worry in his eagerness to see the wider world, and he set off on his journey with a spring in his step and a smile on his lips.

Eventually, the boy found himself entering a great city, the largest human settlement he had ever seen in his life. He wandered among the people, gazing about him in wonder. He thought that this place that his mother had taught him to fear could not possibly be so bad as she had said - after all, she had admitted to him that she had never left the village in which she had raised him. She must have been mistaken, he thought, to think that these happy people would ever be so terrible as they are in her tales.

As he wandered, he caught sight of a child tripping and scraping her knee. Watching her mother tend to her, he remembered his task: he must find the physician that was to tutor him and take him in. He began to walk with purpose, asking directions and slowly making his way towards the citadel. When he finally entered the white colossus, he found and unpleasant sight blocking his way. It was then that he saw death for the first time, a man being killed, his head chopped off, for the crime of having done magic. The boy could not look away as the blade came down, severing terrified head from fidgeting body. Suddenly, he was filled with the fear his mother had always warned him to have of the place - suddenly, he understood what it had cost her to send him into this pit of vipers. The man hadn't been much older than himself and had had eerily similar looks and build (though in truth, they shared only height and complexion) and the boy thought that if only he had said a real, final goodbye to his mother he might feel a lot better about being there as she was surely beside herself with worry that he would never return. He thought of this because he saw now that there was a real possibility that her worries were well-founded.

He found the physician and settled in. Before long, he had insulted, fought and saved the life of the Prince living in the castle. The King had rewarded him for this last by giving the boy to the Prince to be his personal manservant. Neither the boy nor the Prince were terribly happy with the arrangement, but over time they developed a friendship stronger than any the people had seen before or since. The boy continued to insult, fight and save the Prince on a regular basis, though the Prince remained oblivious to the last. When the boy was not doing this, he aided his mentor, and when he had any time to himself, which was rare, he managed to make friends with a noble Lady and her maid, among others, including the Great Dragon that lived beneath the castle, imprisoned by the cruel king. The boy no longer worried so much about being killed for his magic, however, because he had pretty nearly mastered it and was in no danger of having an accident, only of being spied upon. He had found a better life in the city, though it was fraught with danger, and he was happy for a time.

Before long, however, dark thoughts began to seep into his mind. Soon after arriving in the city, the boy had killed a sorceress in defense of the Prince. He tried not to think about it at the time, but after a short while, he was forced to engineer the death of another would-be assassin. It wasn't long before he fell into a pattern of killing every fellow magic-user that entered the city, because each and every one of them had come to kill his friend, the Prince! It didn't much help matters that both his mentor, the physician, and his other friend, the Great Dragon, kept telling him that he was meant to protect the Prince, that it was his destiny to take the prat of a royal and mould him into a first-class King! The boy was overwhelmed with the goings-on of the city: when he was not serving the Prince, he was reshaping his morals; when he was not educating the Prince, he was saving his life; when he was not saving the Prince, he was talking about saving him with the Great Dragon; when he was not discussing the Prince with the Great Dragon, he was doing so as he helped his mentor; the boy felt so exhausted and overworked that he barely had time to think about how many people he'd killed in defense of the city and the Prince.

Until he was summoned back home to save his mother, that is. Bandits were attacking the village and the boy went back to help fight them off. His friends, the Prince, the Lady and the maid came with him. They defeated the bandits, but the boy's childhood friend was killed. As the boy stared at the body of his friend, he could not help but think that at least the Prince had been saved from the arrow meant for him. Though his grief for his friend on top of all his other troubles nearly broke him, the boy could not help but be secretly relieved that at least his friend had died for a good cause instead of allowing the Prince to die and wasting all of the boy's hard work. He knew that to take any kind of pleasure in the death of his first friend was a terrible thing, though, and he acknowledged in his heart of hearts that in all probability the cruel King was right: magic-users must be monsters, because even he was a monster, and he had never tried to attack innocent people like the only other magic-users he'd met in his short life.

And so, the boy's time in his village ended and he returned to the city with his three friends. He continued to do his duty for some time before he was once again forced to confront his ever-twisting morals. A small boy was in the city, being hunted for his magic. The Great Dragon had told him to kill the child, because one day the child would grow up to kill the Prince. The boy was horrified at the idea of killing the child for a crime he may never commit, but it did not stop him from attempting to engineer the child's death. He saved him in the end, having had a fit of conscience, but he knew he would see the child again one day and be forced to decide once and for all whether to kill him or save him from his fate.

As the year went by, the boy noticed a change in his friends. For one, the Prince and the maid seemed to be paying more attention to each other than before. He thought perhaps that she would temper the Prince's arrogance and he would give her the confidence she needed: he would smile secretly and think them a good match when he saw them together. His other friend, the Lady, was changing too, but the change in her gave him far more reason to worry. He had already had to put a stop to her attempts to the kill the King, and he was far from convinced that she had no association with the sorceress who had tried more than once to do the same. He watched her anxiously as she warred with herself over her destiny. The Great Dragon told him that she would one day become a powerful sorceress herself and help the boy-child to kill the Prince in the future. Again, he was in a dilemma of morality, and again, it terrified him that he had so little morality that he could not see a clear path to take. In the end, the Lady chose her path and he chose his, turning her against him and his Prince forever.

But before she did, before the boy became convinced that he was a monster for sure, one who could see children die (or at least try to) and could himself poison his closest friends and use their lives as bargaining tools, he was given a brief respite.

Wow. Didn't expect it to turn out like that: it's not over, either, but since this is a 'drabble series' (more like a oneshot series) I figured I could end the chapter here if it felt right. I know what I want to write for Part 2, but I wanted to end it here so that this is like a prologue. Maybe I'll do three parts to this and turn in into a drabble series after, or maybe I'll give it three chapters, change the title and do a new drabble series. Maybe you guys could help with that?

VVxxxx