It ran from her mind, through her veins. Unchanging, stubborn, arrogant. It spoke the most of her, yet represented the least of her. Truthful, deceitful, two-faced in two ways. It spoke truth, it spoke lies. A loyal liar and an unfaithful follower, a loyal follower and an unfaithful liar. Whereas coins had two faces, she had two more. And these other faces led onto reveal more faces she held, none of them truthful to certainty for herself to believe in. Different colors painted each side, but for a time too long, only a single color painted the coins.
Back-to-back in a path of a vague life stood her morals and her beliefs. Killing was wrong, she thought. Killing was needed, she believed. Mercy was right, she thought. Mercy was unneeded, she believed. Four faces of two coins, both of which belonged to different sanctuaries based upon different outcomes. A side of her thought, and a side of her believed. One was selfish, the other selfless.
She treated sentience with value. Sentience had purpose and meaning to them. Those who abused sentience deserved to fall apart, she believed. Yet, those who were willing to learn and change upon one’s actions deserved another chance, she thought. While morality expanded a depth far across what mankind could possibly comprehend, thoughts were simply endless and varied in color.
From thoughts of living well to the thoughts of encountering death. From thoughts of the cold to the thoughts of warmth, and from thoughts of friends to thoughts of family. From thoughts of sorrow to the thoughts of joy, and bliss and whatnot. A contrast existed to everything- everything positive had negativity reflecting it, and vice versa. When one chose to put faith in a belief, the other was always neglected in favor of the chosen one. One thought always shined over others, and so on.Sangue Naga woke up in a world of pale, pale blue- a blue so pale, it almost resembled the white clouds above her. The sun was nowhere to be seen, yet warmth spread across the white grass beneath her. A cool wind blew gently, coexisting with the warmth of the world itself.
A world of white and pale blue, with a speck of red laying still in-between. She was a mere speck to such a large place, she knew well.
A chime rang. Light, soft, gentle. Fragile to an extent, but not susceptible to quick destruction. Sangue pulled away from soft ground, her eyes taking in the sight of an endless series of hills before her. No dirt road marked the symbol of territory trekked by man. Only the white grass moved with the cool breezes.
A chime rang, lightly and softly. Gently to an extent. Quiet, yet discernable ringing of life echoed with the music of the dancing grass blades.
Turning to her right, Sangue found herself staring at an odd little thing. It stood at the height of a child, a dim glow of light red emitting from it. Wings took the place of its arms, its blank glowing eyes staring at Sangue in curiosity.
An odd sense of innocence emitted from the child.
Step by step, the child approached Sangue, spreading its small wings as it tiptoed down the grassy hill. Standing in front of the red-haired woman, the child blinked before letting a mindless smile sprout on its plush face.
It opened its mouth, a chime ringing from it joyfully as it began moving around Sangue in a small circle. It danced with its wings spread, the rings of a bell escaping the child as it laughed.
Laughter.
She knew what it was, and how it felt. But very rarely did she ever laugh. She saw others laugh, and she knew she could as well. Something stopped her, however. Something made her believe she should not laugh freely. It was a privilege given to the sentient, after all. Someone like her, who put down her own self-value far below others’, believed she was lower than sentience. She was grown to be something terrifying, even though her parents did everything to prevent such an event from happening. They were not with her when she crossed weapons for the first time with hostility.
She had always been alone. Perhaps for a reason. Perhaps because someone believed she had to, or perhaps it was a mere coincidence that she was seemingly left to die on her own. She thought her parents hated her. She believed they loved her despite her doubts, however.
The child reminded her of the world she lived in now. A glowing beacon for different colors of life to emerge.
Sangue got up.
Following the child as it began to skip across the hills, the red-haired woman felt the breeze grow stronger. The chimes rang brightly. Two specks of red moved between the white and blue of the world. One laughed, the other pondered.
A few more steps forward, and the skies lost its color.
The chimes grew smaller.
And the child flew away.
Across the hill Sangue was at stood a
reflection of herself.An odd interpretation of what she should have been, or could have been, or whatever she would have been had she not learned of her own morality. The s
kies bec
ame a
vibrant
red. The white clouds
bled, and the
gras
s rem
ained as pure
as it always had been.Disfigured beyond recognition stood a mangled and deranged creature Sangue both recognized and felt alienated by. A rough-skinned basilisk that took on the form of herself, a snake who had shed its skin.
A basilisk that had failed to tear off a mask, and had become one with it.
It cried, letting out a disfigured shriek. It did not move a muscle, for it seemed wary of Sangue. A cry of discomfort, masked with the pleasure of ignoring what it thought and believed in. A cry of pain and a signal for help, tainted with a selfishness that knew no bounds.It was afraid of the woman. It was afraid of itself. The creature inched away from Sangue, a blade unsheathed in its hands. Its claw had been torn off, its chains dangling uselessly from its shoulder.
And its counterpart, Sangue, readied her own blade. Unsheathing the katana that gleamed deathly red under the mercilessly bright and linear skies, Sangue frowned.
A rain of red began to shower over the two. The child had long vanished. Small streaks of red began to taint what was once pure beneath Sangue’s feet, the canvas-like atmosphere of a clear world vanishing almost instantly. It felt like paint, masking the color of anything and drying onto her clothes and body.
The warrior dashed, its shadow charging forward without a second thought. For what could not think or believe in the first place could never have a second thought in the long run.
A gleam of white, red, and fury wildly danced across the fields. Unlike the dances of the child, the blades that clashed under the red skies lacked innocent intent. Malice clashed with concern, rage collided with hope.
A swing to her neck, an area most of those who attempted to kill her aimed at often. Sangue raised her blade and enveloped the creature’s before deflecting it away. A slash from the head to the toe, a sign of aggression shown by some of the hostile people she had met before.
Chimes of death conflicted between two different bells, one of them full of beliefs, the other thoughtless and fearful of everything around it.
A ring.
A chime.
The music of blades clashing, a song familiar to her soul. She had charged in to defend herself rather than attack the creature. The rain did not resemble blood, but rather, the color Sangue had seen for most of her life. Red was her room, a stench of death emitting from it. A reminder for those who visited her with a weapon in hand.She preferred the blue she had seen earlier. It was a kind of blue she saw with her first few friends.
Her only family.A ring, and a chime, and a screech of internal disorder let out by her doppelganger. But she questioned if the creature before her was a fake. Giving it a look, lazy or close, reminded her of herself in some ways. It was a morbid realization of what little things were required to snap her humanity and leave nothing but a shell of murderous intent. She had long lived by a killer instinct, and even now she did.But the innocence of another world changed her a bit.
She managed to change the way her mind grew. She picked up a palette of colors that differed greatly from a blank red.
Steel grey, vivid purple, and a luscious crimson. Sky blue, coffee brown, and a blinding yellow. Emerald green, soft sand, and voraciously diamond whites.She found many colors in a new palette, a new world. The rain changed with her thoughts and experiences, dark grey erasing the vividly red world. The white grass remained tainted by streaks of red, but Sangue found her own body to be erased of color entirely.
The creature had yet to find the
red streaks on itself to fade away. It shrieked in fear. Fearful, but mindless. It did not know the significance of colors aside from red. It refused to learn and change, for it lacked the ability to.
It lacked
sentience.
A trade of slashes, and the monstrosity sobbed at every attack that landed on it. Red, the only color it knew, bled out of its hollow eye sockets. Red, the only color it saw, was the color of the lone eye that hid behind one of its eye sockets.
The swordswoman slashed with a rhythm, swift and brutal. A coordinated cut to one of its vitals on its sword arm before slashing at its tendons near its left knee. She swung her claw and shattered what remained of the creature's chains. It knelt, crying. Yet it continued to attempt to hold onto its blade, the only thing it remembered receiving from something remotely human.
To say that the creature enjoyed killing was perhaps a misassumption made by Sangue herself. Perhaps it simply had to absorb the concept of death and center its entire life around it, and perhaps it had the ability to believe in something.
It simply believed in nothing. A faithless shell that had been left to die, and chose to die alone.
I want to die, it whispered in its sobs.
The woman stabbed the basilisk in the chest, a burst of red emerging from its back. Empty black trickled out of its body drenched in red. It sobbed until the very end. It was a reminder of what Sangue had once seen in a mirror.
She never planned on going back to become something like it. She liked the colors around her. She thought of them to be nice, and she believed that she needed them. She wanted the coins that flipped at her every action and thought to be painted with something new. Something fresh.Something not linear, and something complex.
The basilisk died, no longer a single red. It faded as its ashes left behind the colors it had never seen before. It died.
She fulfilled its wish.
...
...
...Sangue Naga woke up again in a world with stars painting the peacefully dark skies. This was the world she existed in. Her imagination, her very incarnation of her background, existed only to herself. There was no need to share foreign colors to those she had grown close with.
She remembered the days when she truly believed her life would never offer another route. She, out of fear, took the chance to escape the linear road of red. A new palette of colors awaited her, and she discovered them at the cost of accepting the responsibilities that came with the privilege of coexisting with said colors.
It felt nice.
It was neither wrong nor right to feel warmth or the cold. But she preferred the warmth, for it was a feeling she never felt when she was alone. The cold defined her, so she never truly left it. But they coexisted in her life.
And she wanted the balance to remain. It felt selfish, but on the other side of the coin, it was selfless. Humble, yet filled with desire within a few gaps of her heart.
“Up already?”She blinked, her idle expression stuck on her face as usual. She got up and found one of her friends, Amy, grinning at her from another bunk. The other bunks next to her had Lauren and Ben about to fall off of their respective beds. They slept like toy trucks being mixed in a blender.
“It’s still night, you know. It’ll be dawn soon.”Sangue looked out the window. On the far horizon, a very small shade of dark blue was beneath the pitch black skies. Her expression unchanging, she opened her mouth to say something, but found nothing.
And the night marched on, soon to disappear and let another palette of colors enter the world again.
Captain Uni,
Finetales,
Plank Sinatra
