The Aforementioned Sludge

is a city. A nasty city, sprawling out over the valley like some bloated, polluted insect. It is night but the streets are crowded, thousands are out and about. We are too high up to see clearly, but if you look closely you can tell that many are not even close to human. Another odd thing about the city is its configuration. All the homes on the outskirts, and even the buildings, have only a ground floor. As you progress further and further into the city though, you notice that the buildings rise higher and higher, until you reach the queen's palace, in its very heart. It rises in the background, a tower taller than all the rest, carved from a jutting spire of blue crystal.

There is one part of the city that does not follow this general model;

, the closet door is slightly ajar.

A child hides in the closet, covering his ears, the one visible eye tightly closed. The other eye is obscured by his greasy black hair. He is gritting his teeth. He hates this. In his ragged state, the boy contrasts glaringly with the opulence of the room

Notes:

Mother sells him? Father? Pimp? Anyway, Lime gets sold a few times, shipped over an ocean, sold again , shipped over another ocean, sold, taken inland, sold, set to work in some mines in the foothills of the Gods' Circle (I forget what they're called right now, check back later). This entails digging small tunnels branching out from the main shafts, up to forty feet out, in an effort to discover opal dirt. The opals discovered beneath the Circle of the Gods are black, fist-size (on average), and very, very magical {Lime later used one of the opals he stole as ink for his eye tattoo}. He managed to hide one or two of the opals he found and escape {I think he buries them in the strawberry field... or something}, and find his way to the border without being caught. There he is discovered by the owner of a small inn (forget what that was called, too...) as he  was sleeping in the barn. Lime is deloused, scrubbed raw, and fed. Fed real food, probably for the first time in his life. He stays with them for... what, a month? Or something. And from them he learns what life could be like, how being cared for feels. Happy happy joy joy. Then they hear that the angry mine people are looking for him. So he leaves to keep them from getting punished for helping him, gets caught (as was bound to happen), and it turns out that the old Queen of Sri has died, her youngest daughter has taken the throne by force, as is the custom, and she(the youngest daughter) has a fondness for X the bastard/rapist guy.

So, characters:

Lime: the protagonist. He's kinda screwy.

His mother: A whore. We don't see much of her.

X the bastard/rapist guy: a total bag of dicks. Conquered half of Sri, and some outlying islands as well, for the previous queen. Lime's father. Evan's father. Rumored to be the new queen's father, in which case their relationship is even more twisted than we thought. He has a lot of kids. Some of whom he sleeps with. Most are products of rape, of whom X knows nothing, and it is probably better that way.

Scarlet: Lime's childhood friend. They are strikingly similar, and were even more so as children, when they both had true-black hair. Was trained first as a prostitute, then as a courtesan. (Lime's twin sister, though neither knew it.)