“Who am I, if not myself?”
My gaze moves—tight, controlled—like I’m bound by invisible strings. A marionette. I follow the stoic expressions of the figures beside me. They wear the colors of their kind: blues. Noble. Untouchable. I feel the stirrings of anger, but I know it doesn’t come from my heart—not mine. Not me. It’s something foreign. Not a flame that burns from within, but one fed from the outside, stoked by invisible hands.
It isn’t my hatred. It’s this body’s.
There’s a tension here that doesn’t belong to me, a barely restrained frustration humming just beneath the surface. Recognition—or the lack of it. Nervousness, too, laced with caution as the man at the head of the table stares at me. No—at Aston. The name makes sense now. The hanged man from my vision. The body I’ve been trapped inside.
The man—my supposed father—sits tall under the golden light of ornate chandeliers, his sand-colored beard gleaming like crushed coins. Calmly, mechanically, he slices into his meat—blue and raw—and lifts a piece to his mouth. The juice runs down his lips, staining them the color of his blood.
“How has your recent transfer of the reds in your possession been?” he asks.
The words roll out with such casual cruelty I nearly forget to breathe.
“Great,” I hear my voice say—no, his voice. Cold. Smooth. Unshaken. “Profits of two hundred golden Elis notes. A bit less than the average day last week, but still more than yesterday and the day before.” The breath that follows is slow, measured. “The profit should double by next week.”
The man nods in approval. My tongue moves, my lungs fill and release air, but none of this feels like mine. I don’t feel emotion from inside. Only as if I sit deep within a hollow core, and the world presses emotions onto me from beyond. A filtered experience, detached and sterile. I hear chewing. The clink of utensils. A sip of wine. Someone sighs.
There’s no one else at this table besides these blues—no reds, no greens, no others. Just them. A family, perhaps. One that I’m a part of but don’t belong to. My hatred for them creeps in again, subtle and gnawing, but it isn’t because of their color. No. Shockingly—or perhaps not—I hate them because of the emotions forced on me. Not because I choose to.
Why am I here? Why can’t I feel my own thoughts fully? Why is everything seen, heard, tasted, even felt, as if through cloth or glass?
It’s not a prison made of bars. It’s worse. Latex around a soul. A second skin wrapped around mine.
Yet still, this body moves. Even as my mind shouts for agency, it obeys something else entirely. I should panic. Should fight. But I don’t. I just sit here, as this body clenches its jaw and swallows back a thorny frustration—like rose thorns caught in the throat.
“Sebastian,” says the father, lifting his glass and sipping the deep violet wine.
“Yes, Father.” The reply is sharp, immediate.
The man who answers—Sebastian—resembles the father in uncanny ways. Same beard, same sea-bright eyes, same angular jaw. He looks older, or maybe just colder. His suit is royal blue, the same shade as the blood that runs in his veins.
Under the table, I feel Aston’s fist tighten. Rage, masked by etiquette.
“They want us to send more of the oranges,” the father continues. “Silvestro says the invasion is going well. But the reds... they’ve found out about the blood.”
He exhales, glancing toward the tall, arched window that frames the skyline. Then he reaches for the hand of the woman beside him—half his age, maybe less. Her skin is white touched with ice-blue, and her expression is carved from delicate frost. His words now shift from report to command.
“Those pigs have discovered our power, and we must admit—they have a far greater capacity for growth than we do.”
A silence falls. Tension seeps in like fog. The others glance at each other, subtle but sharp.
Sebastian speaks first. “What shall I do?”
The father doesn’t answer immediately. He watches the city through the glass as if it will reveal something. The silence thickens. I feel the body’s legs tremble. Mine? No. His. Aston’s. The father touches his ring with his thumb, polished gold glinting faintly in the light.
“You’re on good terms with the royal family. Especially the second daughter,” he says, voice low. “Pass this on. Quietly. If they know the truth, our business could fall apart. We can’t afford that.”
Sebastian nods stiffly. I see the disgust on his face when he glances at the young woman beside their father—his stepmother, maybe. Yet her smile doesn’t falter. She drapes her hand over his, soft and pale and fake.
“Dear,” she says sweetly. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. As if those cockroaches could ever threaten us—the higher bloods.”
Again, silence reigns. And this time it bites.
This hall could fit twenty houses from the slums. And yet it feels too full of tension to breathe.
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