FORM

Chapter 1 : Inor

There was time here, its fleeting passage barely noticed. Inor sat in a small isolated grove circled at a distance by many larger groves, all remarkable in their unity of esthetic. The trees could be created in any shape that the mind could imagine, but often Inor found that her fellow Blue, the Nobles, chose same-ness, commonality, over individuality. These larger groves were designed to be the height of the latest trend in beauty. It was universally thought of, amongst the Blue, as the optimal place to relax in one of their many nigh-endless picnics. She didn't care much for the normal pursuits of the picnics nor for their idealistic picnic settings. She found the uniformity of tree almost mindless in its redundancy. However beautiful one of those trees might have been, many of them together brought out only their flaws, cheapened whatever idyllic nature they purported to embody. The activities were the same. One small knot of people discussing the highest philosophies of the minutiae of life might have been quaint, but many such radiated only self-indulgence. The stories and the songs too, they were so bound up by one nonexistent yet universally-accepted ideal that they lacked all semblance of life. She imagined the stories leeching the very life out of her just by having to listen to them. Perhaps, she mused, because we lack nothing, we find nothing of value, instead, we make up meaningless values to occupy ourselves.

Here in this little haven of a grove she could hide a little. Its trees from an earlier era stood out, each in its own manner, as if a group of strangers from distant lands had met to discuss business. Here, in this place invisible to the aristocratic eye because of its conglomerity, she found some values of more substance. The creators of these trees had needs. The forms of the trees were practically shouting of their hunger, hunger for trees, hunger for knowledge, for answers. There was always lost space, a part of the patterns conspicuously absent as if to invite someone else to fill in the missing pieces, a bare trunk amidst densely scrawled leaves so tight with text as to be almost unreadable, a stump where some branch appeared to have been shorn. This was not the case of course, defacing a tree was an unspeakable thought, but this tree, like the others, was a provocation, this author had challenged it's utterance. The text of the trees were her thoughts and deepest feelings, plucked from her heart when she wasn't looking and rendered in the woven flesh of others. Conversely, the text of the picnic trees spoke of histories, sons and daughters of nobility noteworthy only in the flat blandness of their lives. The tone was as lofty, as thin and spidery, as the forms of the trees themselves.

Inor knew that the Blue had needs too, not sublimated but expressed in those boring trees. They hungered to be part of something larger, they needed it so much that they clung to their common nobility bitterly. She herself was never part of that. Her desires were more primal, more forebidden, too forebidden to gain expression in society. She hungered most of all for touch. Being the deepest and therefore one of the lowest Blues to be thought noble, even her own father, only a few shades lighter, would never dare touch her. This was the most peculiar part of the life her father had given her: The people didn't touch. When they touched their colors ran together. Were Father to lay so much as a finger upon Inor, the smallest trace of her deep royal blue would seep into his finger, this would, over time, permeate his whole body making him the slightest glimmer of a shade darker. To the trained aristocratic eye of the Blues this change could be noted at fifty paces or more and he might be shunned by all his friends now fairer than he. That his lighter shade would affect Inor as well barely raised the most insignificant thought in his mind. It was well known that the effect of a lighter color on a darker one was almost imperceptible to that same trained aristocratic glance of appreciation. Even if he were to embrace Inor until their colors mixed completely, he would end up far closer to her own shade than she would to his.

The only reason Inor was invited to such picnics at all was her grandmother, the palest pale of lightest blue, she was the highest of the Blues, the nobles. She was the Hand of Illustrium, oldest and greatest of the great White Giants, the true nobles who predated Inor by hundreds of thousands of generations. While this esteemed heritage brought Inor along on the picnic, it did nothing to command any actual attention from any of the others who partook of these regular events. Forever an outsider here, she took to watching them and learning from them. Perhaps if she could understand the Blue and how they worked, she could find a place for herself within some part of society.