Eclipse - Act 1 - The Healing

Chapter 19 - Killian's Secret

Neptune

He stares down at the many pages of the book he has opened up at his hands, his orange goggles resting atop his forehead. Blue hair spiked up slightly and his blue irises gliding across each page. He glances up at some of the workers in here, repairing the rest of the ceiling that collapsed that day, using cement to bind the supports back together. There are a couple other students in here studying, now that the Library is open for people to use as long as they stay away from where the construction workers are.

The book which rests on his table is a nonfiction block about the history of Remnant, a lot of it is jumbled but he has always been intrigued by it. And since Sun has been wanting Blake to see him as a guy that just wants to be there for her and understand her, he wants to try new things, improve on his reading skills and such. Neptune however has started reading simply out of habit from seeing all those books that Blake has gotten him over time. And ones he has been sharing with her.

Well, until recently.

Neptune is many things, but a blind fool is not one of them, Sun has been acting pretty distant lately and being quite detached from them. There are times where he acts more like himself, but Sun has a way about him, a way that feels real, but most of the time it has merely felt like he is doing it for their sake and not his own. To say he is worried about him is a major understatement, but at the end of the day he has been with Scarlet and Sage, so he has been spending some alone time on his own.

Because he has his own problems on his mind, not only the fear of what happened during that battle, all the corpses they have had to find...but also just his own insecurities. Feeling like he always needs to be cool, it may sound silly, but it all comes down to him wanting to make others happy. Or down to how he does not want to feel like he is a normal kid, he has always wanted to stand out, to be remembered.

His blue eyes dart back and forth across the pages, reading about the past of Beacon and Vale.

The King of Vale hundreds of years ago, named Thaddeus Rex, fought in the Great War first hand. He was a man that showed no mercy to his enemies and would always defend his people, to do the right thing. No man would win against him, no Grimm would ever land a hit on him. Wielding a sword that would slice straight through hundreds of Grimm and felt like every strike would trigger earthquakes and tsunamis.

The blood filled the rivers of Vale that once ran with stunning glistening blue water, filled with fish that would go about their daily lives. But after the war ended, all life in those rivers died. The plants crumbled from the ashes, the blood polluted that water and killed everything that lived inside of it.

Secondary Disaster has always been the most prevalent killer in wartime, diseases spread like wildfire across entire kingdoms. Latching onto people no matter the class, no matter the skill, no matter their history, age, gender, sexuality, race, it mattered not. Nobody was safe from the plagues.

King Thaddeus Rex devised a plan to stop this.

He ordered every soldier, every man and woman, to wear masks to protect themselves, and collect every single corpse that was left behind. Whether they were on their side or not it did not matter, the rot does not choose which side to infect. The people followed him, for he did the same with them. He was not a man that would sit down and happily give the orders and watch from a distance whilst drinking wine.

He went with them and cleaned up the ashes of war, taking thousands of corpses and creating hill sized mounds of death to be burned to dust in droves. The stench of all that burning rotten flesh thickened the skies, black smoke caused the days to turn to night for what felt like months, but it was in fact only two days. Some people died from the smoke, others could not take it, but Thaddeus stayed head strong and devised another plan.