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Blood pours from the giant gash like water from a pressurized pipe, spilling over our shoes and pooling around us.
“Enough!” the trainer booms, his voice supersonic and vibrating my eardrums until my concentration slips.
I blink, stepping back and Silver does the same, eyes snapping to his mangled arm that’s already begun to heal itself. A choked laugh leaves him as my control over him evaporates into nothing, but I don’t stick around for a conversation. We already had one this morning and it left a sour taste in my mouth, so I flip off our trainer when he demands for me to stay, going straight for the fucking showers.
What I really want to do is go the fuck home.
Nah, that’s a lie.
I know what I really want to do, but I also know what I have to do, and that’s attend all my classes like the good fucking boy my parentals demand I be. I fucking told them my head wasn’t in it this semester when they called to check in two weeks after orientation. They told me to be a man about my shit and suck it the fuck up.
In less colorful words, of course.
The problem is, I am a fucking man about my shit. I don’t bullshit, sugar coat, or take the easy way out of anything. I work my ass off, just like the rest of my brothers, because, like them, I know our world could shift at any moment if tragedy struck our parents and we’d be called to the throne as its temporary guardian until one of us completed the mandatory steps required to reign. Outside of my own bloodline, there isn’t a single person in this school who can outpower me, and that’s including the people paid to fucking be here.
Do I know all there is to know about our kind and our world, and every little thing required of every single person within it? No. Who the fuck does?
I’m well aware there will forever be more to learn, within these walls and outside of them, but for some reason, these last handful of weeks those walls started to feel like a prison cell, so naturally all I want to do is burst out of them.
My aggression has doubled, my focus has slipped, and for someone in my position, that’s some dangerous shit.
I’m an heir, a fucking Lord, son to the king of the Stygian people, of dark magic, and I’m over here manipulating suicide on my best fucking friend as a way to let out some anger and tension in hopes of feeding my twisted soul that’s ravaged but won’t share what it hungers for.
By the time I hear the gym doors leading into the locker room open, I’m already pushing through the front ones and out into the open air.
I make it five steps before Creed falls in line at my left, Sinner at my right, Legend having told us he would be late for lunch today.
“Heard what happened in training,” Creed says, his eyes scanning the area as we make our way across campus.
Our college is as old as it looks. The architecture crafted by ancient artists, some who are no longer with us. The ceilings reach for the sky with pointed talons before coming down around stained-glass windows. From the outside, it doesn’t look like much, but when you look closer, you notice small things. Like how the flowers that blossom from the gardens hold color profiles that don’t exist anywhere outside of Rathe, the realm and origin of the Gifted, and the grass blades are thicker. Even the black paint that has been licked over the walls just seems…more. Everything in our world is just like the ungifted world, only amplified. It’s kind of like theirs is constructed in sepia, and ours in vivid color.
“Word always did travel fast around here, even for a bunch of Gifted pricks.” I try not to let his words get to me as we continue our way down the path that leads to the main common room. The shine of gold ricochets off the pathway, hitting the lure purple, pinks, and blues that paint the sky. Our daylight is different to the human world too. In the way that ours is better. Saturn’s shadow hovers in the backdrop of pastel colors, and at night…well…
“You need to let this go.”
“You need to mind your own fuckin’ business.” I quicken my steps so I don’t have to walk beside him and listen to more of his bullshit the entire way. My agitation is growing more as the day goes on. It’s like I can hear a fucking ticking time bomb inside my head. The kind you don’t know when the final second rolls over.
My eyes drift right as I think that, roaming over the giant stone wing statue, its gold glittering from top to bottom as names materialize in the center, each one fading in, all to fade out and into another. Hundreds of murdered Gifted names are in that thing. The memorial is suspended in the air, golden swirls winding around its bottom and resign to its top, protecting it like it’s some kind of treasure.
