They don’t bury the dead in the Opal. They don’t burn them either. But the reek of rot still clung to the latticework of hallways like a second-skin.
When Isla Jones first arrived at the facility tucked into the thick of the woodlands, she could feel the resonance of defilement under the soles of her boots. Like a steady, yawning pulse. The facility was, back then, little more than a stretch of concrete buildings with turrets that pierced the underbellies of low-lying clouds and catacombs that descended into the heart of the earth itself. Now, the Opal stretched out between the trees of the forest like an ever-growing settlement, with erected towers, a defensible outer-gate, followed by a shorter inner-gate, the soldier’s sleeping quarters, and the vast training grounds among a cluster of grey buildings. The Opal was something of a hidden city, tucked away from the more mannered society- a sliver of the world immune to the confines of morality.
Isla had been but sixteen back then; a corpse to the rest of the world, a soldier to the Opal. A weapon to sharpen over time. When they’d first stolen her off the streets of Insmoore, she’d been a dull, quick-tempered girl with hunger in her throat and the taste of solitude on her tongue. No family. No home. No one to come looking if she were to simply… disappear.