Everything is blue now, every breath tasting of frost. I can hear the scrape of air over my teeth, while glancing at the bird outside the window, and I hear its wings beating against the sky. In the far corner of the room, three—no, four—meters up, I spot a family of spiders clinging to their web. I see the fine strands glistening, their hairy limbs shifting in tiny, deliberate motions. I hear them, feel their minute steps as if the vibrations hum through my bones.
My knees weaken, and a strange warmth washes over me. I taste my own saliva. It’s strangely sweet, unnaturally so. Blood rushes in my ears, drowning out the room, my hands twitching as though they’ve slipped beyond my control. My chest heaves, but not in panic, moreover in a strange, weightless rhythm. The tight pressure over my lungs vanishes, replaced by a soaring lightness. My arms blur in front of me, turning a shade of blue just paler than my blood. Maybe I’m imagining things, but this all seems too real, rather than surreal.
The world breathes with me, alive and electric. But then, color cuts through the blue. Orange. It’s blazing and searing. It stabs into my vision, painful and wrong. My hands are already moving before I understand why, reaching for the source. My fingers close around something warm and solid and then brush against Harmon’s massive hand.
He growls low in his throat, and the sound cuts through the haze enough for me to release him, while his eyes narrow. “That’s why opposing blood colors aren’t meant to be devoured. At most, in tiny doses, and only with long gaps between. Anymore and you start to corrupt. Before you even see it happening. And trust me, you don’t want to be one of these brainless things, nor do I want to get rid of you like that.”
He looks down at me, his shadow stretching long over my body. He’s at least a head taller, no, way more than that, really, a looming tower. “This is your second, maybe third green dose in a week, boy. This is only an exception because you’re about to kill a king. Don’t drink too much, or else you’ll lose yourself. Do you understand?”
His voice is pure weight and warning, but my focus keeps dragging back to the thing in his hand—the orange blood. Every pulse in my body draws toward it.
“With Eriksson’s DNA rushing through you,” Harmon continues, “you’ll be able to move near-instantly. Steps as fast as a mountain lion of orange blood. Eriksson is truly one of his kind.”
I hear him but don’t. My heart won’t slow, and my breathing is sharp as glass. He’s still speaking when he presses the next dose into my hand, and I don’t even hesitate—I drive it into my vein.
This time, there’s no slow build. It slams into me, a tidal wave, and I stumble to my knees immediately, lungs locking, pain blooming like fire under my ribs. My chest feels ready to burst—not with air, but with blood. Thick, metallic, and choking. The bluish world deepens, the ground itself seeming to shimmer like molten sunlight.
My palms hit the floor, and I watch them move, pale blue and almost transparent, vibrating with heat. They burn. My whole body burns. The rush isn’t a wave anymore, it’s teeth, claws, ripping me apart from the inside out. And I feel all of it.
Every nerve. Every beat. Every impossible surge.
I can’t tell if the trembling in my body is my own or if the world itself is shaking. My vision fractures, and the orange burns brighter in the dark blue haze. My chest is collapsing, and yet there’s no fear—only the consuming flood of sensation.
And then Harmon’s voice cuts through the roar, low but crystal clear, each word deliberate. “This one’s extreme, boy. Forgot to mention—” He leans forward, the shadow of his frame blotting out the light. “—it contains the tears shed by the Eyes of Hope.”