Free The Emperor Awakes by Alexis Konnaris

one fell swoop. The curtain fell on the Empire that had been ruled from this city for more than a thousand years.
    A new chapter was beginning. The Sultan ordered a halt to the looting after three days. The Ottomans obeyed their master and stopped, but they also saw the sense in his message: ‘do not destroy what is now ours’.
    The Sultan lost no time in installing himself in the Vlachernae Palace and making the city the capital of his Empire. The Sultan, finally relieved to be able to finally put a halt to the relentless campaigns and conquests of the last few hundred years, set into motion the next part of his ambitious plans; the consolidation of his sprawling Empire.
    Amongst the confusion of the battle, the Emperor’s fate would become one of the world’s greatest and longest-running mysteries.
    When some of the elite Ottoman Yenitsari troops went through the breach on the wall of the Vlachernae Quarter, they opened the Adrianople Gate, and it was then that thousands of Ottoman troops started to stream into the city like an unstoppable flattening avalanche.
    The Emperor, without any hesitation, relinquished his Imperial regalia and threw himself into the fighting to repel the incoming waves together with the remaining defenders of the city. If there were a body somewhere, it would be impossible to locate, let alone identify, amongst the thousands of dead.
    The Sultan could not allow for any doubt surrounding the death of the Emperor to remain. That would be dangerous for, as a symbol of resistance, the hope that the Emperor could still be alive and could still return to lead a new charge against the new rule would give hope to the Sultan’s newly-conquered subjects and ammunition to his rivals lurking in the background and craving the throne; and it would be an excuse to any foreign powers to interfere and unite against him and his Empire.
    Such a situation would become a gangrene of doubt against the Sultan’s legitimate claim on the throne of the Roman Empire, as rightful successor of the Emperors of Constantinople.
    The Sultan had taken the title of Roman Emperor, in addition to his other titles. He emphasised his descent from the Imperial family of Constantinople and the Imperial blood running in his veins, as one of his ancestors had married a Byzantine princess.
    The Sultan devised a neat and final solution to this problem. The story goes that the news was spread that the last Emperor was killed and that his head was presented to the Sultan who impaled it on the walls for all to see, as a sign of the ultimate humiliation of the Byzantine Empire, the final proof of his great victory and as a message to the remaining defenders to take away their faith, to sap their strength and the hope, which they were still clinging on, that they could still win, with the Emperor as the symbol of their struggle and as their leader.
    The Sultan was certain that with the dead Emperor being paraded publicly and with such brutal fanfare, his new Byzantine subjects would lose heart and the will to fight and would finally submit to his rule; any resistance would be quashed and would die a silent death with not even as much as a whimper.
    But amidst rumours that the Emperor had removed his Imperial regalia and others saying that the so-called body of the Emperor when found had no Imperial signs or regalia, to irrefutably confirm the Emperor’s death, a huge cloud weighed on the truth of the Emperor’s fate.
    And as the prophecy goes, “he will rise again and free us …”

CHAPTER 9
     
    Constantinople
29th May 1453 A.D.
(The Day of the Fall)
     
    The Emperor never asked to see me that day to find out about the Likureian icon. No doubt his mind was otherwise engaged. I hoped he was inspiring fire into the hearts of the defenders.
    I dared not leave my room for fear of being accidentally and forcibly recruited to the suicidal numbers on the walls. I could not put my life in danger like that. Not here. Not for this lost