Origins of Blood (RE)-Chapter 180: Ruby’s Cry (2)

By Helios... what in the hell is happening? My temples pound so hard it feels like my skull might split.

“All dead...” The words stumble from my lips, dull and bitter. Curse them.

“They killed them all.” Then the truth claws through the Red. “The Goldens killed them all.”

My hands tear through my hair as if that might dull the pain. Staring down into the endless Red Sea below, the horizon burns. The galleons that once gleamed under starlight now rot beneath crimson tides. Even the moon bleeds.

The kids.

My throat tightens. My hands shake. I turn, searching the cliff. “Elena, Ella, Tristan—” The names choke out before I can finish. My chest hollows. Only Doran remains on the mountain bird, his small frame motionless, eyes locked on feathers drowned in Red.

Amber kneels by Vis and Lenny, her face pale, yet tainted by Red. “Where are they?” My voice cuts through the drizzle, desperate. Neither of them looks at me.

“Where are the kids!”

A hand grabs my arm, but I throw it off. My boots slide through slick flesh and blood as I stagger toward Amber. “Where?” My breath is broken, and my throat pierced by thorns.

Amber doesn’t meet my gaze; I shove her shoulder. “Where!”

Her lips tremble before she answers, and when she does, her voice breaks. “Dead.”

“What?” The word escapes like a plea.

“Exploded.”

“Ah.” The sound is hollow, foreign, not mine. No tears come—or maybe they do, but cannot feel them beneath the bleeding sky.

I breathe once. Twice, the taste of iron coats my tongue. “All dead, huh?”

No answer. Just rain. Blood. All hope falls with it.

Amber’s voice turns somewhere distant. “Get Vis onto the mountain bird. Find Leonard and Dellin—for the sake of—move!”

Valea nods to my side, her face ghostly pale, another Orange swallowed by the haze. “On it!”

“I’ll search too,” Lenny says from behind me.

“No,” Amber snaps, pushing him back. “You stay with Vis. You and Evelyn are the only ones who can give him blood to recover.” She swallows hard, her eyes darting over the corpses staining the ground.

“You’re coming as well?” she asks me, frowning.

Looking down at my boots, I see an arm lying next to a leg, both stripped of flesh—something inside my mind twists.

“Don’t come...” I whisper, but not to her; to something else. Something I cannot see.

Lenny hoists Vis onto his back, grunting under the weight. Amber and Valea move toward the cliff’s edge, and though my mind stays behind, my legs follow. We start to climb down into the Crimson Sea of Ruby.

...

Time fractures. Minutes bleed into seconds, or maybe the other way around.

Blood coats the rocks. I blink—and when my eyes open again, I’m somewhere else; my vision spins.

“Less...” I mumble. Or more. I think.

The world tilts. My hands slip, and my lungs collapse. The stone wall before me blurs into Red mist.

Am I climbing—

“Wha—!” My voice cuts short as the ground vanishes beneath me.

Splash!

Warmth engulfs me, heavy.

Kicking upward, the blood drags me down; my fingers claw through the surface, breaking into air, and above, the Crimson moon looms, small yet drowning everything in its color.

I gasp. My lungs seize.

Was I climbing? Or descending?

The thought doesn’t stick.

Another breath. Another scream.

Fresh blood soaks my back as I roll onto the slick stone, my chest breaking. “They’re dead...”

My breath shudders.—My body trembles.

I lie there, bathed in blood, the world drowning in its own sin.