[Chrono Trigger Novel - Episode 10] The Door That Opened After Three Days
In the prison, day and night changed only with the bells.
The narrow window beyond the bars showed more of the castle wall than the sky. When the morning bell rang, cold soup was brought in. After the evening bell, half the torches in the corridor were extinguished. Crono used a piece of leftover bread to draw lines on the floor beside the door.
On the first day, Pierre did not come.
On the second, Crono overheard the guards talking about the disturbance Marle had caused outside the north tower when they refused to let her visit. The King had posted guards outside the princess's chamber, they said, and Lucca had been expelled from the castle.
On the morning of the third day, no soup arrived.
Two soldiers came instead. One of them carried a black hood.
“Get up.”
Crono looked at the three lines on the wall.
“Am I being released?”
The soldier did not answer. The other opened the cell and fastened iron cuffs around Crono's wrists once more. The hood smelled of old cloth and oil.
“The court sentenced me to detention.”
“We only carry out the orders we're given.”
There was no conviction in the younger soldier's voice. Avoiding Crono's eyes, he pulled on the chain.
A tall wooden frame stood in the chamber at the end of the passage. The blade suspended above it shone white in the torchlight, and the grooves cut into the floor bore the faded color of something washed with water many times. The prison supervisor paced before it with a document clutched in one hand.
When Crono entered, the man cleared his throat.
“By order of the Crown, the sentence will now be carried out.”
Not once did his eyes leave the page as he read.
Crono measured the distance between the execution platform and the door. Two soldiers and the supervisor. His wrists were bound, and he had no sword. He might be able to charge and knock one man down, but there was not enough room to evade the next spear. More footsteps waited outside.
Before the certainty that he could not escape had time to settle, another thought pressed down on him: no one had spoken of the verdict. The words given by seven jurors in the courtroom had never reached this tower.
One of the soldiers reached out to pull the black hood over his head.
Metal burst apart beyond the door.
A blue flash cut through the gap, followed by a short cry. The lock flew inward and skittered across the floor. Lucca stepped through the smoke.
One lens of her goggles was cracked, and the tool bag on her back bulged more than usual. In her right hand was her launcher, loaded with a fresh round. In her left was the cutting tool Crono had seen in Taban's workshop.
“So this is what you get for waiting quietly for three days?” she said between breaths.
Crono glanced up at the blade, then at Lucca.
“You're late.”
“You can complain later.”
Lucca set the tool against a link in his shackles. Sparks sprayed from the glowing metal.
The prison supervisor recovered his senses and shouted, “Seize the intruder!”
Both soldiers leveled their spears. Crono wrapped the severed chain around one hand and yanked the nearest shaft toward him. As the soldier lurched forward, Crono drove a shoulder into his chest. Pain tore through the wound in his side, as if it had split open again, but he did not stop.
Lucca's shot struck the floor in front of the second soldier. Chips of stone flew up, and he shut his eyes on instinct. Crono struck his wrist with the captured spear shaft, knocking the weapon away.
“Don't kill him!” Lucca shouted.
Crono reversed the spear and shoved the man in the stomach with its blunt end. The soldier struck the wall and collapsed into a sitting position.
The supervisor retreated behind the execution platform and reached for the alarm cord. Lucca hurled the cutting tool. Its heavy handle struck the back of his hand, and the cord swayed just beyond his fingertips.
“You follow regulations awfully well for someone executing an innocent man.”
Lucca walked over and took the ring of keys from him.
“I only received the paperwork.”
“Then the paperwork can take your place in the cell.”
She shoved him into an empty one.
The alarm bell began to ring as soon as they reached the corridor.
The north tower was more complicated inside than it appeared from without. Stairways used for moving prisoners, soldiers' quarters, and passages leading onto the walls crossed at different levels. Lucca followed small arrows she had drawn on the stone. They were traces of the three days she had spent secretly scouting a way in.
“They'll concentrate their forces at the main gate. We have to cross the upper bridge and get to the central tower.”
“What about Marle?”
“Locked in her room. But do you really think she'll stay there quietly?”
Two floors up, a pounding came from behind another set of bars.
A young man gripped the cell door with both hands. His clothes bore the mark of the merchants' guild, and one side of his face was swollen.
“Please, let me out. I'm not a thief. All I did was point out that the accounts didn't add up—”
Lucca heard footsteps on the stairs above.
“We don't have time.”
Crono stopped.
His eyes met the prisoner's. Crono remembered the cell in which no one had checked his own sentence for three days. He held out a hand for Lucca's keys.
“Crono.”
Lucca looked from him to the approaching soldiers and back again. She swallowed a curse, then tossed him the ring.
“Find the right one on the first try.”
The third key turned.
When the door opened, the young man bowed over and over.
“My name is Fritz. My father owns the general store in Truce Market.”
“Go downstairs and hide in one of the open cells,” Lucca told him. “Don't run until you see a clear way out.”
The guards rounded the corner just after Crono and Lucca reached the next landing.
Crono held the stolen spear crosswise, blocking the narrow stairway. The moment the first soldier's shield struck it, Crono pushed down instead of forward. The bottom of the shield caught against a step, and the men behind it crashed into one another. Lucca shot down a hanging lamp. She avoided spilling oil on them, but the flames and smoke divided the passage.
“Was that part of the plan?” Crono asked.
“It is now.”
They emerged onto the castle wall.
Rain had begun to fall. The banners of the Millennial Fair hung soaked against the stone parapet, and the forest below was drowning in evening mist. At the far end of the bridge to the central tower, the Chancellor was waiting.
Behind him, soldiers untied the ropes around a massive object covered in cloth.
Four wheels appeared with a clatter of metal. The front of the vehicle bore a mechanical dragon's head, while a cannon and oil tank rested on its back. A blue crystal in the head lit up, and gears began turning by themselves within it.
“You broke into a royal prison to save a criminal,” the Chancellor said. “Now we no longer have to trouble ourselves with the word innocent.”
Lucca studied the machine's movements.
“The head is repairing the chassis. If we only attack the body, it'll keep putting itself back together.”
Crono gripped the spear shaft in both hands. It was longer than his cracked sword, but badly balanced. The bridge was narrow enough to drop them straight down the castle wall, and the machine occupied its entire width.
The dragon's mouth opened and spat flame.
Crono and Lucca split toward opposite parapets. Burning oil swept across the stone between them. While the cannon turned to follow Lucca, Crono thrust the spearhead into the left wheel. The gears caught the shaft and dragged it inward as if chewing through the wood.
He held on and lowered his body.
The wheel stopped for a single instant. As the chassis tilted left, Lucca ran up and shot through a cable beneath the dragon's head. The blue crystal flickered but did not go dark. A slender metal arm emerged beside the severed cable and began splicing it back together.
“Open it up one more time!”
Crono twisted the shaft free of the gears. Half the spearhead had been torn away. The machine lurched forward again, forcing him toward the edge.
There was nowhere to dodge.
He jammed the shortened shaft upright between the dragon's jaws. The closing mouth split the wood, but the obstruction trapped the flames inside and heated the head's outer casing. As the machine began to buck, Lucca stepped onto the parapet and leaped.
She did not fire. Instead, she pulled a thick wedge from her tool bag, drove it between the plates of the warped head casing, and struck it with a hammer.
The turning repair arm caught on the wedge.
The mechanism bit into its own gears and seized. Light throbbed erratically inside the blue crystal.
“Get down!”
Crono grabbed Lucca by the coat and pulled her with him.
They hit the bridge as the dragon's head exploded from within. The blast forced the chassis backward, and one wheel slipped over the edge. The soldiers tried to hold it, but its weight was too great.
The Chancellor stumbled back and caught himself on the collapsing machine. As it tipped over the wall, he clung to the edge of the parapet and screamed.
Lucca looked down at him.
“You're going to save him too?”
Crono answered by dropping flat and extending his hand.
The Chancellor stared at it for a moment, unable to comprehend a hand offered by the man he had ordered killed. At last he caught Crono's wrist. Lucca took hold of Crono's belt, and together they hauled him up.
When more soldiers came running, the Chancellor crawled across the stones toward them. He managed neither an order nor a word of thanks.
Crono and Lucca descended the stairs of the central tower.
In the entrance hall, Marle stood facing a line of soldiers. She had exchanged the princess's gown for the clothes she had worn at the fair, and Crono's cracked sword was in her hands. She was not pointing it at anyone; she held it sheathed against her chest so the soldiers could not take it from her.
“Stand aside.”
Though their spears were raised, the soldiers did not move.
The King appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Nadia.”
Marle's shoulders tightened.
“If you're going to call me by that name, then listen to what I say. Crono was innocent.”
“That boy broke out of prison and destroyed a royal weapon.”
“Because the royal court tried to kill an innocent man first.”
The King's gaze shifted to the Chancellor. Soaked with rain, the man stood behind the soldiers, doing nothing but pulling his collar closed.
“I gave no such order.”
A brief silence filled the entrance hall.
Marle searched her father's face for a lie. But the King's bewilderment was real, and that seemed to hurt her more. A man had nearly died on an order the King knew nothing about, and no one had been able to stop it.
“Then you have even more reason to let us go.”
Marle handed Crono his sword.
“No one here can protect him.”
The King descended one step.
“You are a princess. You cannot defy the authority of the Crown because of personal feelings.”
“I'm a person before I'm a princess.”
Marle moved to stand beside Crono and Lucca.
“And these aren't feelings. They're facts I witnessed.”
A path opened between the soldiers. Not because they had been ordered to make one, but because none of them could bring himself to point a spear at the princess.
The three companions ran through the castle gates and into the forest.
The rain grew heavier, and the torches of their pursuers spread among the trees behind them. Blood was seeping through the bandage at Crono's side, but they could not stop. Lucca took out her tracking device and followed its trembling needle.
“This way. I'm getting the same response!”
They reached a dead-end cliff deep in the woods. Between a fallen ancient tree and the rocks, the air folded in on itself with a blue glow. It was a Gate, just like the ones at Leene Square and Truce Canyon.
Marle looked back.
The torches were drawing closer. Beyond them, the castle towers were faintly visible through the rain.
“Where does it lead?”
“I don't know.” Lucca held up the Gate Key. “This one hasn't been mapped.”
For a moment, Marle gazed at the castle. Beneath the anger on her face, hesitation passed like a shadow. Leaving meant choosing freedom, but it also meant allowing the last words she had exchanged with her father to remain words spoken in fury.
Crono held out his hand.
Marle took it.
“Let's go.”
Lucca activated the Key, and the rain bent into the blue rift. Behind them, the Chancellor shouted for them to stop, and spearpoints appeared among the trees.
The three leaped into the Gate together.
Just before the light closed, Crono looked back once at the forest and the castle.
The door to freedom he had waited three days for had never opened.
Instead, a door to an unknown age received them.
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