FINAL EPISODE - The Maiden of Monaco

Novella Thursdays

Chapter VIII

CHRISTOPHE kept his pace steady, his line of sight dead ahead and ignoring the countless faces along the designated route of the race.

The marathon had started an hour out, meant to give all in Paris a chance to see the two finalists on this Christmas morning as they ran against one another through the snowy streets leading back to the Palais.

Every few blocks Christophe would look to see how far back his opponentwas trailing him, and by his estimation he had kept a two-minute lead throughout.

It had been a gamble to start off the race with a sprint, but they felt his youth and size was the one natural advantage he would have in this first half of the final competition.

They, as in he and his beloved, the two having stayed in each other’s arms for quite some time the night before while the blood they were lying in dried as they contemplated the challenge ahead.

The two young lovers agreed that the best way to go about finding a solution to their problem was to look at it as if it were a fairytale.

Knowing beforehand the details of the last challenge allowed them to think of possible ways the main character would achieve victory in the climax of their story. A risky strategy for something as real as what they were facing, but then again hadn’t the events that had unfolded thus far proved to be just as worthy as any of the stories they had read?

And so Christophe went about bringing their conceived fiction to life. Taking a significant lead from the start so that the bigger man would use brawn over brains by trying to match his younger, faster adversary, and therefore become winded far sooner than he would have hoped.

Such an approach wouldn’t have been taken if it weren’t for the rule of automatic disqualification for a contender if it was thought that he was not giving it his all. Wise as they were, the Grimaldi family eliminated the possibility of Germany, or anybody else for that matter, of using the strategy of willfully losing the race in order to conserve one’s energy for the hand-to-hand combat.

Just as the princess and the young lord had predicted, the distance between the two adversaries remained far enough to where a steady pace could now be kept by Christophe, while another component of their logic came to fruition in that the German would try to rehydrate himself by eating snow, of which actually had the opposite effect.

So there he was, the underdog of every single challenge, covering the last few yards of the marathon with controlled breath while his opponent, some two minutes behind, fought to keep his massive body from giving way.

All Christophe could hear when he got to the front of the Palais was the deafening cheer of hundreds of thousands. The area had been cleared for the final battle, and as Christophe filled his lungs with oxygen he looked up to the viewing deck that had been set up for the royals and found his Angelique, seated alongside King Philip, his wife, and members of the Grimaldi family.

If he failed to defeat Germany in this last bout not only would he lose his beloved forever, but even worse would be the fact that her impurity would be discovered, resulting in the downfall of her and her family, as well as the possibility of her death.

The horrific thought sent a much-needed surge of adrenaline through the boy’s body, urging him to get on with the second half of the plan before his remaining ninety seconds of rest time ran out. And so he began to strip away his clothing.

With nothing on but his foot ware and a hemmed up version of the night shorts that had been pulled off his body the night before, Christophe charged ahead, the surrounding sea of eyes all believing the boy had gone mad under the pressure of facing this final challenge.

Not a single one of them had an inkling as to what was really going on. That this was all part of the tale that he and the Maiden of Monaco had envisioned while in a nude embrace. All fairytales involved clever wit triumphing over superior strength, and this one would be no different, or at least they hoped.

Heaving like he had just been pulled from the depths of an ocean, Germany fell to his knees upon crossing the finish line, fighting for breath in a few moments of vulnerability. Vulnerability that the protagonist of this legendary story-in-the-making needed to capitalize on if he were to have a chance of coming out on top.