You were made, you suppose, to be a martyr. A holy calling, martyrdom; as any holy calling, you despise it. All your friends have such grand destinies, if you believe: revolutionary, pirate, high priest, queen. But what is there for you to believe? Nothing. Iron and blood, and abandoning your convictions.
Of course you'll hand your soul over to her empire (to any empire): the dream of the threshecutioners, sun-bright and just as deadly, is that blood will not stop you.
You're three sweeps old. You see them in your schoolfeeds, and they gleam, and not a single one of them is a smidgen higher than blue. It's something to work for.
Sweep after sweep you work for it: and you get good. You get better than you dreamed. Your friends stop laughing at you. Your friends stop smiling at you. You keep improving.
You're seven sweeps old. Sollux spits gold in your face and tells you they will destroy me and you're going to die. He hands you an id card with your face on it, the closest shade of blood to yours. Fuck you, he says, walks away, doesn't come back.
Eventually the time comes. You have your sickles, your skill, your sign to keep you safe. A rustblood ident in place of Sollux' friendship. (You'd hold out hope for something black, if you meant to see your lowblood friends again.)
You make it to conscription; you make it past. You make it all the way into the threshecutioners and you shine with purpose and with glory and it's up to you to make the empress proud.
You don't. You fuck up, like you were always going to fuck up. You report for training and you're not as good as you thought you were and you get cut – scratched, really, nothing bad enough to even bandage if you had just been normal – and the dream of the threshecutioners was only that.
You're ten sweeps old. They don't put you in irons. You don't scream. Your instructor takes you to a little room and leaves you there, and after a while the air is too thin to breathe.
(In the end, you die for nothing. It's not better.)