by Richard M. Ankers

Somewhere beneath a savage sky lies a kingdom shrouded in blue. Legend says the sky itself was blue one day, and that the world below was the beast, not the world above. This changed long ago. At least, long before me. Still, what are songs passed down through the generations for if not to inspire hope? I do hope, but I don't know what I'm hoping for.

𓆟

I stare. Staring is an occupation in which I specialize. Where others pick a subject and concentrate very hard, like studying a chess piece or watching an unbalanced bird flapping on a washing line, I see the bigger picture. I open my eyes wider than golf balls and take in every photon of diffuse light. True, they fill mostly with blue, but it comes in many shades, and I'm familiar with them all.

Cerulean is the cleanest, crispest blue. A blue so vivid as to define every other shade set against it, cerulean is the mask the other blues would wear. It shines as an example, provides a backdrop to accentuate all else. A shade for the soul as well as itself, cerulean haunts everything. I gasp at its magnificence, but it soon ghosts away.

There’s a fade after this, where every blue lessens. There is no diminishment, however, nor fingers pointed. Every blue plays its part in the grander scheme of things. From the insipid luxury of turquoise, through to the delights of aquamarine. Both these blues were once associated with the ocean: a thing of water, of rippling liquidity, settled upon the earth, not falling from above. But this was from long before me, and probably longer before you.

I have a penchant for the deeper blues, a yearning, one might say. Those named royal, or navy, and best of all, ultramarine. The latter is another of the wet blues, but one with hints of submerged worlds even more unknown than the one above. Ultramarine is the ferryman, the color that leads us from our bright definite lives to our uncertain dark deaths. Yet, and here I stress, I have no proof. Bright! Who am I kidding? I long for those darkest depths.

Just thinking of that sulphuric and jaundiced yellow sky fills me with distaste. So upsetting is it, the color blue is suddenly banished from my thoughts altogether. Time to rethink my world-encompassing observations. Time to sleep.

𓆟

I dream in rainbow colors. I dream of bejeweled splendor. Ruby and emerald delight my senses as gold and silver shine. Opal and amber only enhance these visions, as do tangerine, bronze and amethyst. They send shivers of delight through my recumbent form. I giggle in my sleep like a spoiled child, expecting to feel the nibble of tiny mouths cleaning my sides. Christmas comes all at once until sapphire steals away the show.

Glimpsed as though through a window. A sparkle. A blue dot. I am drawn from the colors making my illusion so perfect, as if it's inevitable. My eyes lock onto the blue, fasten upon heaven, and the wisps of bridal white that flit across it. Which is the dream? What is the truth?

The where and the why trouble me so much I no longer know who or what I am. Neither do I have the strength left to care.

𓆟

I awake to a cloying gloom, eyes as wet as always, yet never from weeping. There is no blue, for I am emerged in it. A flap of a fluke. A blink of a giant eye, and I bolt for the surface, having spent too long under the slapping waves. My brothers and sisters await.

There's a wretched wind upon the lake. An awful stench circulates above this, the last water the earth possesses. Our lake, the one we have carved out through the powerful limbs of generations, scrubbing and rubbing away the sediment and rock, is now surrounded by death. The worst color of all—the ebony of decay—proliferates. The volcanic orange of spewed lava grows close, like blood-filled veins emptying out of an open wound. I would gulp, but it would sting.

We sing to the ravaged sky. We weep our final tears. The blue we inhabit shall soon be no more. Humanity's legacy shall take the last of us to wherever it is they went. I hope it is to that somewhere blue. Whether I swim or fly there may be another's decision.

Richard M. Ankers (he/him) is the English author of “The Eternals Series,” “Britannia Unleashed,” and co-author of “The Poetry of Pronouns Books 1 & 2.” Richard has featured in Daily Science Fiction, Love Letters To Poe, Starspun Lit, and feels privileged to have appeared in many more. Richard lives to write.