Drained Of Color Novels & Stories

' He grumbled through the mind link. Red, it was the colour of blood. It is the colour that spills as one is tortured and beaten. The deep shade was the most visual form of pain. The pain that I enjoyed giving to those do dare disrespect. It was the colour of the devil. However, Athina had proclaimed it to be colour of the angel. The deep shade wasn't a sign of pain or danger when it came to her. It was simply a colour showing its beauty.

“You can?” I blink, and just like that, the color drains from the world, leaving me once again in darkness. “It’s gone,” I say, a note of despair creeping into my voice. “It was just for a second, but I saw... in color, Ruin. Not just the negative images I usually see.” Ruin is silent for a moment, processing what I’ve just said. Then, he’s moving, his hands cupping my face gently. “Chloe Jane, this is incredible. It might be a sign, an indication of your powers evolving, or...”

His blood shot eyes were blankly staring at the ceiling, bottle of expensive liquor in his hand from which he had been drinking like an addict. He was sat on the floor, with his back leaned against the side frame of his king sized bed. His hair grown, face pale and eyes mahogany. He looked high on drugs. And he indeed was.

No matter how hard they tried giving me other shades, I ended up discarding them until they embraced the idea that colors weren’t for me. I had tried integrating a darker shade of color on my artwork multiple times, but it didn’t give me the same ecstasy when I only used black, gray, or white. It was uninspiring and draining. It was ruining my creative ideas. Port was correct; I was living my life in bleakness. Always has been. I had embraced this life. I had accepted the bleakness of my life. It was never hard for me; it was numbing, so it didn’t make any difference.

“By the time we reached them, they were already gone.” Eloria’s hand stilled on her quill. “Gone how?” Marek’s eyes darkened, the memory flashing behind them. “Drained. Just like the others we’ve found. Skin pale, veins collapsed, eyes blackened as if the soul itself had been stolen. It wasn’t an animal, or any wolf I’ve known. It was… worse.” Eloria leaned forward, her gaze narrowing. “And then?”

Draven's POV I felt my power being sapped from me. It wasn’t a bleeding out, not a wound you could bind up. It was my soul being wrenched from my body, sucked out one thread at a time into the waiting hands of the crone. My Lycan power, which had sustained me for years of exile and poverty, was ebbing away little by little. I knelt me down, had double vision at the edges. The ferals edged in closer, picked up the scent of weakness and were prepared to tear me apart when I failed altogether.

He did not, as she had seen in her nightmares, look furious. He went pale. It was a profound, shocking, and terrible paleness. The blood drained from his face, leaving his skin the color of ash, making his gray eyes look like two burnt holes in a mask. He was not angry. He was not sad. He was, simply, caught.

"You have done enough. Let me hold you." I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him I could still fight. But the truth sat heavy in my lungs. I was empty. Drained. Useless. I hated it. I hated feeling like war was happening around me, and I was nothing, but dead weight. My fingers twitched against Draven's arm. I was trying to call up even a spark of power, but there was nothing. The well inside me had run dry. "Your heartbeat is so fast," Draven said quietly. "Breathe with me. Just breathe."

My heart stuttered in my chest, hope and fear warring inside me with equal ferocity. Right under my fingers, those ugly, thick blue veins that had been spreading across Ronan's jaw and neck like a spiderweb... they started to fade. It was like watching ink get washed from a shirt, the darkness dissolving under the gentle pressure of clean water. The dark, sickly purple color just began to recede, dissolving back under his skin as if it had never been there at all. His cheeks lost that awful, pasty grey look, a faint, healthy flush of pink starting to creep back into his jawline.

The silence inside the subterranean cell was heavy enough to crush bone. Alpha Killian remained completely motionless, his towering, muscular frame cast in sharp, jagged shadows by the flickering torchlight outside the iron bars. His dark gaze was glued to the floor, tracking the slow, agonizing drip of my blood. On the grey dirt, the crimson fluid didn't pool like a normal wolf’s. It separated, a shimmering, liquid gold swirling through the red like oil in water, glowing faintly against the cold stone.