THE TREE ON THE HILL • Eren Jaeger

iii. the dark.

2853.

ONCE, you were not quiet with lucid thoughts. You were conscious that your blood and mutiny against prejudice held you liable to strange penalties, and you learned this well, in school.

Back in Marley, you were the only Eldian in your class. Nobody said it outright, but the invisible difference hung in the air like a tangible smog, separating you from your peers as though they were donning masks to keep you away. Their Marleyan parents must have told them to be wary of you, because you had a biology that could allow you to become a freak of nature.

Your body and features were not at all different, but you knew your long history was. What your maroon blood was. The veins in your tiny little child body had the ancient power to turn into a Titan, reminiscent to every Eldian before you, a dark ink on humanity that all living creatures rightfully feared even two thousand years after their explosive demise.

"Why, stop moving and let me get ahold of you, you're akin a rabid cat! For shame! What awful behavior, girl, to throw a book at your friend!"

"Friend!" you repeated. "Friend! How is he my friend? He called me a Titan. What, am I his mule?"

"No, you're less than a mule," said the school teacher, "because you cannot even follow simple orders. It must run in the blood."

In the blood. She was not talking about your mother. Your mother was respected. You couldn't recall much about your father after he had killed himself a few years ago. She never met him. No, she was not talking about parents. She was talking about your race.

The teacher led you into the isolation room, where the most naughty kids were punished with time-out alone. She thrust you upon a stool, and your impulse was to shoot up like a spring, but you were arrested instantly and made to sit. It was not fair. The Marleyan boy in your class had been threatening to hit you, claiming he could beat the Titan blood out of you as long as he cracked your spine. It was what his father did in the Marleyan military, he said. Eldians were slaves, and they should remain so—they ought to be segregated.

You had nothing to say to the hurtful words—you were not at all new to them, as your mother's family wasn't fond of you either, even if you were half-Marleyan and related. This insulting reproach of your malicious ancestry was a constant cymbal in your eardrum that painfully crushed your head each second until you went numb.

But when he began to touch your spine with his sticky child fists, brushing against the bending bone that held natural secrets you were barely aware of, you freaked. It was instinct, a natural genetic trait. No one was allowed to touch your spine or your nape. Not a single creature.

You launched your textbook in his ugly face. The book was a thick hardcover. The fragile corner smushed upon impact, and it left a gruesome purple bruise on the boy's face that worsened when he began to cry to the teacher about 'the wicked Eldian who hurt me.'

"You've been a bad child, and it is your place to be humble and agreeable—it is expected of you. What I tell you is for your own good because that way, it will help you fit in like you're a real Marleyan."

She left, shutting the door, and locking it behind her.

The time-out room was a small, square chamber, resembling a supply closet with drab gray walls. A single foldable table and a few rickety chairs lay about the room under a dim light bulb—much analogous to an interrogation cell for guilty criminals. Such was the environment in Marley: pale, chill, and remote. Never mind it was an elementary school. There was no color in a nation built from spiteful ashes.

You were not quite sure that the teacher had locked the door, and when you got up to check, it was true that it was watertight. All looked colder and darker than ever, and you specked the gloom like a phantom. It reminded you of the ghost stories about Titans and their deadly walk across the earth, the result of Paradis' attack two thousand years ago.