“It was not my mother, my father, nor my siblings who cared for me when I scraped myself on thorns as a boy, but a red girl, executed the very next day.”
Arthur and I walk side by side through the streets, the rather slim greens and broad oranges in bright contrasts that clash almost violently in my eyes. Arthur resembles his family about as much as a human resembles an ape—same species, but the shared dignity stops there.
We Blues are taught from childhood not to question our reason for existing, but for days now I’ve been steeped in studying them. The Reds. Their culture, their ways, who they were before we stripped them of everything. I want to know them. I want to understand.
Arthur’s hair is blond like mine, his eyes the same piercing azure. But there the likeness ends. He lacks the elders’ beard of shimmering sand. Still, even in this thick, bluish fog, his eyes glimmer with a knife’s edge sharpness. His brow is furrowed even though his body remains relaxed, as if the tension is ornamental, something he wears with the same care he would a military sash.
He isn’t older than me—perhaps a decade at most—but when I’m forced to stand beside him, I feel dwarfed. He stands tall. I imitate him, chin up, posture stoic, exactly as all Blues are taught, whether by family or in those damned middle-class academies that pass for schools.
But I’m not like him. Not truly. I can’t be like him. I don’t want to impose. Don’t want to wear the lie that I’m proud of what I am.
My gaze follows his, my mouth parting slightly in instinctive surprise before I snap it shut. I force myself still, stiff as a candle. We stand in the middle of the road, a carriage in the hazy distance. The ground here is dry, no Denklin mud clinging to our boots. The clouds have been swept away, leaving only the pitiless sun overhead.
How ironic. Helios, our so-called god of the sun, bestows this warmth upon us, as if he didn’t forget us entirely in our making.
I watch the wind ripple through grass, capturing the fleeting moment of what we so pretentiously call Mother Nature while I’m surrounded by the higher-blooded.
“What in Apollo’s name happened here?”
The question breaks the silence. It’s delivered in a thick northern accent, hard edges softened by age, but still near impenetrable.
“What in Apollo’s name happened here?”
The leader repeats himself, voice low and slow but no clearer.
Arthur doesn’t move. Neither do I. I try to take in the scene.
At first I see a girl. Red. A slave. My brow knots to mirror Arthur’s. Then I see him.
A man of nobility—like me.
Blond hair, shoulder-length, tied back. A trimmed beard I could wear myself if I didn’t keep shaving it away in self-loathing. But it’s what I feel, more than see, that hits me. My blood crawls in my veins, prickling in my fingertips.
He’s faking the role of a noble.
I see him clench his fist and beat his chest twice. Then once, flat palm over his heart.
The veterans’ salute.
I stand ramrod straight, concealing my shock.
Only veterans of the Great Fall of Delora are allowed that sign. Anyone else is executed on the spot. Even royalty would swing for such a transgression.
But no one around us seems to care.
The orange-blooded leader just embraces him.
I hear the disguised noble’s voice, casual.
Arthur’s face stays carved from stone, but his eyes sharpen with understanding. Mine do the same. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, there’s a grin on Arthur’s face, gone as quickly as it appeared.