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Chapter Thirty: Equally Jeopardized •EDITED•

October, Year 483
Forest of Lacau
State of Nicia
North

All men are born equal.

That was the first sentence, the very beginning of the Book of Identity. Philip had based his entire life on those five words. They had kept him alive when he had lost all hope on being wanted by anyone.

They were the words he lived by.

All men are born equal. In a similar fashion they die equally, having nothing but their works and names to differentiate their buried skeletons and similarly deep and soiled graves.

When his father plotted to have him killed Philip still remembered that verse.

Equal. . .equal.

When he had almost starved to death, living on the streets of Auro as a beggar, he still remembered. When a random passerby shot him a look of disgust; when other nobles saw him as inferior because he had been adopted into a declining household; each time he felt like ending his suffering forever. . . He remembered.

Because he had always felt that if he worked hard enough he could get to the top and leave his muddy beginnings behind. Philip had never bothered about the way people saw him, he had only worked.

Long hours, longs days; little pay and zero accomplishments. That was how his life worked and he was content with that. For a while just using his hands to support himself was more than enough.

Then his grandfather—the man who practically gave him life—died a miserable death, a pitiful end. . . to be backstabbed by the very people he had tried to guide and protect, his foolish equals.

That was when Philip realized that equality was a lie, an illusion meant to silence protests and appease the masses of the working and middle class citizens. Men always searched for something to lord over one another. The poor were beneath and the rich were above. The successful were craved and the failures were discarded and erased from memory.

It was life.

It was a sham that the weak found strength in.

He was weak and equality was a ruse to keep him moving forward.

No looking back, I've gone too far for that. . . Philip stared at Issac the same way an enemy spy stared at their torturer the moment they were about to die—with eyes brimming with murderous acceptance.

All will to fight lost, a desperate hope for death, a new outlook on the phenomenon called life. Philip and a despairing traitor had all that in common but the messenger had no intention of letting out his feelings.

He and Issac were not equal. It was a fact he had to ignore till he could deal with it without feeling like his limbs were being hacked away by a blunt saw.

To be honest, he would prefer torture to this—whatever it was—the stinging pain in his chest and behind his eyes, scratching at his ribs and skull.

The thought thrashed at walls that held back memories he had hoped to forget, and Philip felt sick all over again as he grasped at his shirt, where his heart was supposed to be.

As a child he had wondered if he had one, that beating organ that many associated with emotion—with love. And right now, he couldn't help but fall into the old habit.