Everything is white.

Plain, boring, one dimensional.

White stretches across streets, blankets over buildings, fills cracks and crevices. It's omnipresent and all-consuming, on the clothes they wear, in the houses they're assigned and go home to, in everything linear, facet and tangent. There's no escape, no exit, nowhere to go where colour exist, where blue thrives, red is abundant, yellow overwhelms.

Irene is trapped in the middle of nowhere and somewhere.

Structures are identical, and the people are as diverse.

At least the sky is some pale blue obscured by the glass dome that surrounds, that protects, that cuts them off from brilliant shades of marigold sunsets and vanilla sunrises. She can't really tell, can't really see if the sky she stares at is real or artificial like everything else in the city. Illusion and reality collide, bleed into one another and creates more ivory tint.

A hue so easily marred but dominating, blinding. It hurts to at look for too long, irritates Irene's eyes. She should be used to this, to the shade that terrorizes them in uniformity. Individuality doesn't blossom, doesn't exist. it wasn't allowed; it was banned. And if anyone so much wielded the desire to be different, to stand out, punishment is passed fairly.

or not.

What can be worse than having freedom stripped---no, Irene corrects herself. They're born in a world without freedom, without the taste of owning their souls. They don't decide for themselves, they don't choose, they don't have a say. Only yes and no, and that's apparently living.

Irene scoffs. More like existing, of just being something disposable, expendable. In a city where a queen reigns, and her word is law, they're all pawns. The ashen ones craved from some silvery slab of marble, ordered to do this or that because it's for their own good. This is for them, propaganda spreads like the plague, attaching to everyone in white.

And they fall for the farce because living where everything is bright is better than surviving in the dark. Monsters lurk in the shadows, attack when least expected. Obsidian strikes fear, festers tremors, grapples the heart and dissolves bravery.

But it's much easier on the eyes.

Monsters prowl in the light, too. No one sees. They just blend in too well in the masks of white, pallid smiles. Then they attack, claws and fangs out, gleaming, shimmering, fatal. It's a slow and painful death.

Life is a disease.

Everyone dies.

And legends praise they go towards the light, the clouds, the heavens. Achromatic always.

Irene is sick and tired.

If she's going to live just to die, she craves colour under the blazing yellow sun, staring at the tranquil blue sky while lying on grass evergreen and lush as she bleeds red.

Everything is white, and Irene hates it.