Sipping the last of my tea, the taste clings bitterly at the back of my throat, then I set the cup down and rise. Vis glances up, nodding with quiet acknowledgment. I nod back. Lenny grins wide, gums and tongue as green as grass, teeth parted in a boyish show.

I pass Amber in the corridor. Her frame is broad, but for one of the orange, she is small, scarcely half a head taller than me. Not unlike Elisia, though Amber's skin is rougher, her muscles leaner, carved from struggle.

Further along, Eriksson sits with Elena, a book as big as the Reds' head cradled in his hands. His voice flows steadily as he reads—some fairytale drawn from the small library beneath our headquarters, where the Hearth rests.

Each step I take presses on my side. Needles prick deep beneath the skin, and no relief follows. They will never vanish unless I heal them away.

Green blood. Its warmth rises deep from my thoughts, not to forget its mending power, and I would give anything to drink even a single dose. But it is nowhere near a syringe and is forbidden as well. Drinking it would mean corruption—a polite word for ruin.

Your own blood turns foul, they say. Your cells collapse within you. The whispers of the Golden take root in your mind. You hear the deities, feel them devouring you from the inside out. Your flesh decays, your veins clot, until all that remains is madness.

Maggots eat one, starting from the blood and bones, through the flesh, and only once they are feasted, they crawl—if not out of the mouth, then through the skin, breaking veins.

And eventually, they harbor the body until nothing remains to control it. Whether the soul departs and finds the afterlife is unknown. How ironic, that gods, who should care for us, are the last thing that drives us mortals—drives us into corruption—into brainless creatures.

Thud.

A sharp growl escapes me as I turn deep in thought and kick my toe against a chair left to my side. As always, it's the chair of that scar-faced Grim, but he's currently somewhere with beloved ones, as are most of us—pain flares. My growl dwindles into silence as it ebbs, yet it still lingers.

This upper store is empty now, the air still carrying the taste of dust and salt. I stand alone, yet my thoughts are filled with things I shouldn't care about at the moment. How many of those brainless wretches now stumble across the frontlines of Nigil and Zentria?

Before all this, the two kingdoms shared a vast territory of forests, an endless green expanse, until conflict came with Eduard the 3rd, King of Nigil. He despised the balance, could not stomach the state of things. His reign ignited the fracture, set it ablaze with the decision to enslave the whole of Earth.

Of course, the excuse was trade. They knew no one would favor them in fair dealings. They knew they would be shunned, offered nothing, perhaps not even scraps.

Perhaps, I think with bitter amusement, if they had asked nicely, they might have been treated equally. Maybe all of this could have been solved with words.

Laughing silently, my hand trails across the surface of an even-layered table, its wood calm and indifferent. Honor. The Royals' greatest enemy. Even with the sentence of death over their heads, they would never bend the knee, never plead for forgiveness.

And so the war spirals. The frontlines, once filled with armies of conviction, must now be swollen with the brainless—the corrupted. Without Oranges to burn them away, the war itself may unravel into nothing but rot.

Yet again, I worry for things that do not belong to me. Not every soldier is corrupted. Not yet. Only half the men carry the pressure of higher blood pressure in their veins.

And still, most Green or Orange-blooded let them—the weak, the proletarian Blues—drink of them in large draughts, handing them temporary strength, temporary advantage, whenever circumstances demand it.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.