Welcome! As for meâoh, Iâm a jack of all trades, master of none⌠but Iâm working on it. A proud amateur in the truest sense of the wordâamare,âto love.â
Masterpost: (updated) July 20th, 2026
Includes: My poems, Diary Entries, Stories, Art/Sketches, Photographs, and Incorrect quotes (for bbc sherlock).
Poems:
âThough humble be my rhymes, yet let them tend thy gentle soul, sweet traveller.â (-by me)
It's not me anymore
Crimson Rose
Morning with No Sun
Just a shot of Gin
The Divine Right
Eternal peace
A Wilting Flower
Before the bloom (Prequel to Crimson Rose)
Love Potion
Autumn's silence (not strictly a poem)
Fatigue
Absence
Pulsating vein and blade
Islands
A letter
Voices
Rules and Revelry
Paths Unaligned
Eraserhead
Play pretend
Death of a star
Cursed Humans
How can I love myself?
Farmerâs Home?
I used to be an artist?
Between sigh and thought
Coming Dawn
Winter Rain
Undiluted
Moonflower
Liberation
Do not wake Me.
Paper Thoughts
2319
Sleep
Scarecrow
Eagle (For Irene Adler)
Stories:
Swim and Save (A diary entry)
Short Adventure (A diary entry)
Still, Sleepless Night (Prose- Paragraph)
Time before 221B (Sherlock Holmes birthday special)
You could mute the entire show, replace the dialogue with a generic static noise, and the plot would still clearly be- "Two men communicate solely via desperate, soul-searching eye contact while a crime occasionally happens in the background."
You know how sherlock always forgets Greg's name, and we all find it hilarious as much as lestrade finds it infuriating.
Now imagine, what if Sherlock, unlike anyone else, always referred to lestrade as Gregory instead. I mean how much would that annoy lestrade.đ¤Łđ¤ŁHe'll always be screaming "DON'T CALL ME GREGORY!!!!! IT'S DETECTIVE INSPECTOR LESTRADE TO YOU!"
The best part is that Sherlock would absolutely defend it with some warped, flawless logic. Heâd look at John completely baffled and say 'John "Greg" is a monosyllabic grunt. I am a busy man, if I am going to waste oxygen addressing the police, I will use a proper noun.' đđ¤Ł
-Young Sherlock ANON (AKA prodigal son)
Absolutely hilarious đ¤Ł
And because Sherlock is calling him Gregory, Mycroft would call him something else that infuriates him. There's probably a fuller form of Gregory somewhere Mycroft acesses because Sherlock stole the name he was planning to use!!đ¤Ł
That explaination is so Sherlock lolllll I love this!!
What I find even more hilarious though is that this works perfectly with my idea of "Sherlock knows what Lestrade's name is but this is more hilarious to him," because this is just going on the other end of that.
"It's DI Lestrade to me? Why does everyone only grunt for you to answer them? Use some logic, Gregory."
Gregory is so done with him.
Thank you luv for the wonderful ask!!! I hope you're doing well!!!
She stared at him for a long moment, realizing with a sinking, desperate sort of clarity that she had fallen entirely, hopelessly into the deep water of his existence. And the most terrifying part was that he had no idea he was drowning her.
-by me ( @somekindofparadoxhere )
Š Do not repost or publish without permission. Feel free to reblog.
As step 1 of our* quest to start exchanging loanwords back and forth to increase the overlap between the languages, in order to gradually make them more mutually intelligible, with the ultimate goal of fusing the languages back together into one big super-language, we need a comprehensive list of all the words that are the same and mean the same thing in finnish and estonian.
*the "we" includes you. if you can read this and speak either language, you're getting drafted to the cause. Goes extra for bilingual people, you're our only hope.
The morning after I decided
to sleep forever,
the house woke early.
The sun burned brighter,
the sky was bluer than it had any right to be.
Birds gathered on the wires
and rehearsed soft harmoniesâ
songs they had never sung before.
In the kitchen,
my mother leaned over the stove,
stirring my favourite meal.
Its warm, familiar scent
wandered through the hallways
and wrapped itself around the house
like a memory.
In the living room,
my father sat on the sofa,
remote resting loosely in his hand.
The television was quiet.
Instead, music drifted through the roomâ
a song from my playlist
playing softly into the morning.
And my brotherâ
hunched over his desk,
pencil scratching against paperâ
was sketching our favourite cartoon,
the one we used to laugh at
until our stomachs hurt.
The house was full of me.
Only I was missing.
Not in my bed. Not in the mirror.
Not in the hallway.
I wandered from room to room,
searching for the place
where I used to be.
And for the first time it dawned on meâ
how unbearably beautiful
the small, ordinary things were
that I had left behind.
-by me ( @somekindofparadoxhere )
Š Do not repost or publish without permission. Feel free to reblog.
I posted this earlier, but accidently deleted it, but thankfully I wrote it in the notes app so I still have it...!
Alright! Just for you dear @triflesandtea !!!!!!!!!<3
Okay so....Coelacanths were thought to be extinct because their fossils disappear from the geological record around 66 million years ago--right around the same mass extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. Since nobody had ever seen a living one, scientists assumed theyâd died out too.
Then in 1938, a museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer examined a strange fish caught off the coast of South Africa and realized it matched those âextinctâ fossils almost perfectly. It was one of the biggest zoological discoveries of the 20th century.
What makes them especially important is that theyâre lobe-finned fish--their fins are fleshy and supported by bone structures somewhat similar to the early limbs of vertebrates that eventually evolved to walk on land. Watching them swim is apparently eerie because the fins move in an alternating pattern that almost resembles walking.
Theyâre also ancient in a very literal evolutionary sense. The lineage is over 400 million years old, meaning coelacanth ancestors existed long before dinosaurs did. Modern coelacanths live deep in the ocean, usually hundreds of meters down near volcanic caves, which is probably part of why they escaped notice for so long. Theyâre nocturnal predators that eat smaller fish and squid, and they can grow over 6 feet long.
And somehow they only get stranger the more you learn about them!
There are actually two known living species--one found near the Comoros Islands and East Africa, and another discovered in Indonesia in the 1990s. Until that second species was identified, people thought the first was the only surviving coelacanth left on Earth.
They live incredibly slowly. They can apparently live for around 60 years or more, donât reach maturity until their 40s or 50s, and have very low reproduction rates, which makes them especially vulnerable as a species.
Their reproduction is wild too-- they donât lay eggs externally like many fish. The females keep the eggs inside their bodies, and the babies hatch internally, so the young are born live after an extremely long gestation period that may last over 3 years, which is one of the longest known pregnancies of any fish!!
They also have a unique organ called the rostral organ in their snout that can detect electrical signals in the water, helping them locate prey in dark deep-sea environments where visibility is poor.
And despite looking like they should be enormous apex predators from some primordial nightmare, theyâre actually pretty calm and slow-moving most of the time. They conserve energy by drifting in ocean currents and hanging out in underwater lava caves during the day before hunting at night.
One of my favorite details is that they still have a tiny oil-filled structure where ancient lungfish relatives wouldâve had a functional lung. Itâs basically an evolutionary leftover from ancestors that lived in much shallower waters.
And despite seeming so âprimitive,â theyâre not unchanged fossils frozen in time, theyâve still been evolving all along. Theyâre just part of an incredibly old lineage that survived while most related groups disappeared.
Also, scientists were so stunned by the 1938 discovery because finding a living coelacanth was sort of equivalent to discovering a living dinosaur wandering around unnoticed. Entire textbooks had to be reconsidered because this animal had gone from âextinct for tens of millions of yearsâ to âapparently just extremely private.â
Good lord I went on for too long, Sorry!!đ
But I do hope this satisfies your curiosity!âď¸
It wasn't a sound, but a visual cacophony that hit him before his eyes were even fully open. He reached for his glasses on the bedside tableâusually a dark comforting mahoganyâand recoiled. They were a bright, electric cyan. He blinked, rubbing his eyes until stars danced in the lids, but when he opened them again, the nightmare persisted.
He looked down at his legs. He had fallen asleep in his favourite jeans. The familiar, deep indigo was gone, replaced by a garish, pulsating bright orange.
âNo,â he whispered, his voice cracking.
He stumbled into the kitchen, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. On the counter sat a bowl of fruit heâd bought yesterday. The bananas were a bruised, regal purple. The limes were a shocking magenta. Even the sunlight streaming through the window didnât feel warm; it felt cold, casting a sickly, pale blue tint across the floorboards that should have been honey-brown but were now a dull, bruised slate.
He didnât change. He didnât brush his teeth. He ran.
Outside, the neighbourhood looked like a fever dream. The asphalt of the street was a blinding, snowy white. The skyâthe vast, eternal skyâwas thick, suffocating shade of burnt copper. Abraxas sprinted towards Leoâs house three doors down, his lungs burning.
He pounded on the door. When Leo opened it, he looked like a ghostâif ghosts wore neon-green skin.
âAbraxas?â Leoâs eyes were wide, the whites of them now a faint, alarming yellow. âTell me you see it. Tell me Iâm just having a stroke.â
They didnât speak. They huddled in front of Leoâs television. The screen flickered to life, showing a news anchor with bright blue skin and hair the colour lemon. The ticker tape at the bottomâusually redâwas a vibrant, dizzying green.
ââŚreports coming in from Tokyo, London, and New York confirms a global chromatic shift,â the anchor stammered, her professional mask slipping into pure terror. âScientists are calling it âThe Great Inversion.â There is no known atmospheric cause. NASA confirms the sun is still yellowâor, rather, what we perceive as yellowâbut to our eyes, it has turned a deep, violet-blue.âÂ
Abraxas watched as the screen panned to Paris. The Eiffel Tower stood like a silhouette of oxidized bronze against a copper sky. The world wasnât just different; it was the photographic negative of itself.
The walk back to his house was a blur of mass hysteria. People were kneeling in the streets, praying to a copper sky. Others were looting grocery stores, though most stopped when they realized the meat looked like blue plastic and the bread looked like charcoal.
When Abraxas finally shut his front door, his phone was vibrating off the table.
50 Missed Calls: Mom.
He picked up on the first ring. âMom?â
âBrax? Are you there? The gardenâŚmy roses, theyâre blue, Brax. The grass is red. Is it the end? Is the Revelation here?
âI donât know, mom,â he said, forcing his voice to stay level, though his hands were shaking so hard he almost dropped the phone. âBut Leo sees it too. Everyone sees it. Itâs not just us. Stay inside, okay? Iâll⌠Iâll figure it out. Iâll call you tonight.â
He sat in the darkâor what used to be the dark. Now, the shadows had a strange, luminous quality to them. He didnât eat. The thought of eating a purple banana made his stomach churn.
He sat at his computer, the white light of the monitor hitting his face as a deep, abyssal black. He scrolled through forums, through scientific papers, through frantic Twitter threads.
âItâs a gas leak in the ionosphere.â
âItâs a mass hallucination caused by 5G.â
âItâs the aliens reformatting our retinas.â
None of it made sense. Abraxas stared at the screen until his eyes ached. Then, a sidebar advertisement popped up. It was an old archived page for an art supply store. It featured a simple, circular graphic: The Colour Wheel.
Abraxas froze. He leaned in, his nose inches from the screen.
He looked at the orange of his jeans. On the wheel, Orange sat directly across from Blue. He looked at the purple bananas. Purple sat across from Yellow. The red grass outside? Red sat across from Green.
âComplementary,â he breathed. âItâs a perfect inversion.â
It wasnât a biological failure. It wasnât a chemical leak. It was a mathematical shift. The world hasnât changed its essence; it has simply swapped its palette.
He grabbed a notebook. The paper was black, so he used a pen that now leaked white ink. He wrote one word: WHY?
ââ
The world didnât stay panicked forever; it became exhausted. By the second month, the âInversion Sicknessâ had set in. People grew lethargic, depressed by the muddy, bruised hues of their own skin and the neon-green salads they were forced to eat.
Abraxas however, was fueled by a manic clarity. He had spent weeks mapping the intensity of the shift. He noticed, that while everything was inverted, the âvibrancyâ wasnât uniform. In his research, he found satellite imagesâleaked before the internet became a sludge of black-and-white textâshowing a focal point.
There was point in the high deserts where the colours werenât just inverted; they were thick.
âIâm going, Leo,â Abraxas said, tossing a pack into the back of his rust-orange (formerly navy) sedan.
âGoing where? The government has blockaded the cities, Brax. They think itâs a biological weapon.â
âItâs not a weapon,â Abraxas said, tightening the strap. âItâs a mistake. Look at the sky, Leo. Look at the clouds.â
Leo looked up. The copper clouds were heavy, looking almost like they had been layered on with a palette knife. âItâs just⌠weather.â
âNo,â Abraxas muttered. âItâs a smudge.â
He drove. The journey was a thousand-kilometre trek through a landscape that looked like a psychedelic nightmare. He passed through âThe Red Forestââthousands of acres of pines that had turned a violent, bloody crimson. He drove past the salt flats, which now glowed like a sea of black ink, reflecting the copper sun with a terrifying matte stillness.
He felt like a detective chasing a ghost. He kept his colour wheel taped to the dashboard, a compass in a world that had lost its true north. Every time he felt his mind slippingâevery time he started to believe that the grass had always been redâhe looked at that wheel. He reminded himself of the truth.
By the third week of his journey, Abraxas reached the coordinates. He was deep in the deserts, miles from the nearest ghost town. The air here felt different. It didnât smell like sagebrush or dust.
He climbed on a high ridge, his boots crunching on white sand that should have been golden. When he reached the summit he stopped.
Below him, the world stopped making sense.
There was a massive, invisible wallâor perhaps a literal edge. A few hundred yards ahead, the desert simplyâŚended. It didnât crumble into a canyon or meet the sea. It ended in a flat, vertical expanse of nothingness. A vast, primed white void that stretched up into the copper sky and down into the white earth.
âThe horizon,â Abraxas whispered, his voice trembling. âItâs not a curve. Itâs a border.â
He ran towards it. As he got closer, he saw the âInversionâ in its rawest form. He saw a massive streak of blueâreal, true, beautiful blueârunning across the white void. It looked like a skyscraper-sized smear of paint.
He reached the edge of the world. He reached out a hand, expecting to feel air, of perhaps an energy shield.
Instead, his fingers touched something cold, slightly tacky, and immense. It felt like a wall of stretched fabric.
Then, he heard it.
It wasnât a sound from the desert. It was a sound from above. It was rhythmic, scratching noise, like a giant treading on dried leaves. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
The sky above himâthe copper skyâsuddenly darkened. A shadow the size of a continent fell over the desert. Abraxas looked up, his heart stopping in his chest.
A massive, wooden beamâmiles long and polished smoothâdescended from the heavens. It moved with a slow, terrifying grace. Attached to it were millions of fibres, each as thick as a redwood tree.
It was a brush.
And it was dripping with a globule of wet, cerulean liquid the size of an ocean.
Abraxas fell to his knees. The shadow of the brush was so vast it didnât just block the sun; it erased the concept of day. The âscritchâ he had heard earlier was replaced by a sound like a thousand tidal waves crashing at onceâthe sound of bristles meeting the atmosphere.
He looked up, and for the first timeâ his eyes pierced the âAtmosphere.â
It wasnât a sky. It was a ceiling of light, and beyond it, looming in the unthinkable distance, was a face. It was a face of impossible proportions, blurry and out of focus, as if seen through thick glass. The âgodâ was wearing a pair of headphones that looked like silver moons and was squinting down at the world with a look of mild, academic frustration.
âWeâre just a project,â Abraxas choked out. The air around him began to vibrate.
The giant brush descended. It hit the âhorizonâ a few miles to his left.
The impact didnât feel like an earthquake; it felt like a rewrite of physics. Where the bristles landed, the white void was instantly smothered by a thick, heavy layer of Ultramarine. The colour was so deep, so pure, that it hurt to look at. It wasnât blue as Abraxas knew itâthe inverted orangeâit was the Original Blue. The correction.
The student was repainting the sky.
Abraxas watched as a wave of wet, heavy pigment rolled across the desert like a lava flow of pure light. It consumed the copper sky, turning it back to azure of his childhood. It hit the âRed Forestâ in the distance, and as the shadow of the brush passed over the trees, the violent crimson vanished, smothered under a fresh, wet coat of Sap Green.
âWait!â Abraxas screamed, throwng his arms up towards the face in the heavens. âWeâre here! Weâre alive!â
But how do you hear the scream of a pigment? To the student, Abraxas was nothing more than a microscopic imperfection, a tiny speck of dust or a stray hair trapped in the previous layer of paint.
The brush moved again. This time, it was coming straight for the ridge where Abraxas stood.
H tried to run, but the air was growing thick. The smell of turpentine was now a physical weight, stinging his lungs, making his head spin. The world was being primed. He looked at his handsâhis orange-tinted, inverted hands. He saw the texture of his skin. Under the terrifyingly bright light of the studentâs studio, he didnât see pores or hair. He saw cross-hatching. He saw the delicate, fine lies of a 000-grade sable brush.
He wasnât a man made of flesh and bone. He was a series of clever strokes, a character designed to give life to a mid-term assignment.
The giant bristles, each one a pillar of dark fibre, slammed into the earth a mile away. The sound was rhythmic thud-squish.
Abraxas braced himself. He thought of his mother, sitting in her house with her blue roses. He realized with a jolt of horror that she wasnât worried in the way humans worryâshe was just painted that way. Her grief, his panic, Leoâs confusionâit was all just a study in âEmotional expression and Colour Theory.â
The wave of new paint reached him.
It was a wall of cold, viscous blue. It didnât hurt. It felt like being folded into a heavy silk blanket. As the cerulean wash passed over him, Abraxas felt his orange self dissolve. The orange jeans, the cyan skin, the frantic, inverted heartâthey were being buried.
For a second, he was suspended in the wetness of the paint. He looked up one last time.
The student had leaned back. Abraxas saw the giant reach for a giant, translucent containerâa coffee cup the size of a cityâto take a sip. The student looked bored.
âJust a little more highlight on the foreground,â a voice boomed. It wasnât a voice; it was a vibration that shook the atoms of the universe. It was the sound of a god checking the time. âThen I can turn this in and go to sleep.â
The world went quiet.
ââ
Abraxas opened his eyes. He was standing on the ridge in the desert.
The sky was blue. A perfect, boring, textbook blue.
The sand was gold.
The sun was yellow.
He looked down at his leg. His jeans were blue denim. He touched his face; his face was the warm, tan hue it had always been. He felt...perfect. He felt corrected.
But as he stood there, he realized he couldnât move his left arm. He tried to turn his head to look back at the white void, but his neck was stiff. In fact, he couldnât feel the wind anymore. He couldnât smell the sagebrush.
The world was beautiful, but it was static.
He looked out over the desert and saw Leo, or at least a figure that looked like Leo, standing near a car down the road. Leo was frozen in a pose of mid-cheer, his hand waving at the sky. He wasnât moving. He wasnât breathing.
Abraxas tried to speak, but his lips were sealed shut by a layer of high-gloss varnish.
High above, the âSunâ suddenly clicked off. The warmth vanished instantly, replaced by a cold, fluorescent hum.
âNot bad,â the God-voice echoed, sounding distant now, as if waking away from the table. âThe composition is a bit centered, but the colour correction saved it. C+ work, at least.â
A giant, heavy sheet of black plastic descended over the entie world, blocking out the studio lights.
Abraxas stood in the dark, a perfect man in a perfect blue world, trapped forever in the drying ink of a student who had already forgotten he existed. The mystery was solved. The colours were right.
And the world was finished.
-by me ( @somekindofparadoxhere )
Š Do not repost or publish without permission. Feel free to reblog.
It wasn't a sound, but a visual cacophony that hit him before his eyes were even fully open. He reached for his glasses on the bedside tableâusually a dark comforting mahoganyâand recoiled. They were a bright, electric cyan. He blinked, rubbing his eyes until stars danced in the lids, but when he opened them again, the nightmare persisted.
He looked down at his legs. He had fallen asleep in his favourite jeans. The familiar, deep indigo was gone, replaced by a garish, pulsating bright orange.
âNo,â he whispered, his voice cracking.
He stumbled into the kitchen, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. On the counter sat a bowl of fruit heâd bought yesterday. The bananas were a bruised, regal purple. The limes were a shocking magenta. Even the sunlight streaming through the window didnât feel warm; it felt cold, casting a sickly, pale blue tint across the floorboards that should have been honey-brown but were now a dull, bruised slate.
He didnât change. He didnât brush his teeth. He ran.
Outside, the neighbourhood looked like a fever dream. The asphalt of the street was a blinding, snowy white. The skyâthe vast, eternal skyâwas thick, suffocating shade of burnt copper. Abraxas sprinted towards Leoâs house three doors down, his lungs burning.
He pounded on the door. When Leo opened it, he looked like a ghostâif ghosts wore neon-green skin.
âAbraxas?â Leoâs eyes were wide, the whites of them now a faint, alarming yellow. âTell me you see it. Tell me Iâm just having a stroke.â
They didnât speak. They huddled in front of Leoâs television. The screen flickered to life, showing a news anchor with bright blue skin and hair the colour lemon. The ticker tape at the bottomâusually redâwas a vibrant, dizzying green.
ââŚreports coming in from Tokyo, London, and New York confirms a global chromatic shift,â the anchor stammered, her professional mask slipping into pure terror. âScientists are calling it âThe Great Inversion.â There is no known atmospheric cause. NASA confirms the sun is still yellowâor, rather, what we perceive as yellowâbut to our eyes, it has turned a deep, violet-blue.âÂ
Abraxas watched as the screen panned to Paris. The Eiffel Tower stood like a silhouette of oxidized bronze against a copper sky. The world wasnât just different; it was the photographic negative of itself.
The walk back to his house was a blur of mass hysteria. People were kneeling in the streets, praying to a copper sky. Others were looting grocery stores, though most stopped when they realized the meat looked like blue plastic and the bread looked like charcoal.
When Abraxas finally shut his front door, his phone was vibrating off the table.
50 Missed Calls: Mom.
He picked up on the first ring. âMom?â
âBrax? Are you there? The gardenâŚmy roses, theyâre blue, Brax. The grass is red. Is it the end? Is the Revelation here?
âI donât know, mom,â he said, forcing his voice to stay level, though his hands were shaking so hard he almost dropped the phone. âBut Leo sees it too. Everyone sees it. Itâs not just us. Stay inside, okay? Iâll⌠Iâll figure it out. Iâll call you tonight.â
He sat in the darkâor what used to be the dark. Now, the shadows had a strange, luminous quality to them. He didnât eat. The thought of eating a purple banana made his stomach churn.
He sat at his computer, the white light of the monitor hitting his face as a deep, abyssal black. He scrolled through forums, through scientific papers, through frantic Twitter threads.
âItâs a gas leak in the ionosphere.â
âItâs a mass hallucination caused by 5G.â
âItâs the aliens reformatting our retinas.â
None of it made sense. Abraxas stared at the screen until his eyes ached. Then, a sidebar advertisement popped up. It was an old archived page for an art supply store. It featured a simple, circular graphic: The Colour Wheel.
Abraxas froze. He leaned in, his nose inches from the screen.
He looked at the orange of his jeans. On the wheel, Orange sat directly across from Blue. He looked at the purple bananas. Purple sat across from Yellow. The red grass outside? Red sat across from Green.
âComplementary,â he breathed. âItâs a perfect inversion.â
It wasnât a biological failure. It wasnât a chemical leak. It was a mathematical shift. The world hasnât changed its essence; it has simply swapped its palette.
He grabbed a notebook. The paper was black, so he used a pen that now leaked white ink. He wrote one word: WHY?
ââ
The world didnât stay panicked forever; it became exhausted. By the second month, the âInversion Sicknessâ had set in. People grew lethargic, depressed by the muddy, bruised hues of their own skin and the neon-green salads they were forced to eat.
Abraxas however, was fueled by a manic clarity. He had spent weeks mapping the intensity of the shift. He noticed, that while everything was inverted, the âvibrancyâ wasnât uniform. In his research, he found satellite imagesâleaked before the internet became a sludge of black-and-white textâshowing a focal point.
There was point in the high deserts where the colours werenât just inverted; they were thick.
âIâm going, Leo,â Abraxas said, tossing a pack into the back of his rust-orange (formerly navy) sedan.
âGoing where? The government has blockaded the cities, Brax. They think itâs a biological weapon.â
âItâs not a weapon,â Abraxas said, tightening the strap. âItâs a mistake. Look at the sky, Leo. Look at the clouds.â
Leo looked up. The copper clouds were heavy, looking almost like they had been layered on with a palette knife. âItâs just⌠weather.â
âNo,â Abraxas muttered. âItâs a smudge.â
He drove. The journey was a thousand-kilometre trek through a landscape that looked like a psychedelic nightmare. He passed through âThe Red Forestââthousands of acres of pines that had turned a violent, bloody crimson. He drove past the salt flats, which now glowed like a sea of black ink, reflecting the copper sun with a terrifying matte stillness.
He felt like a detective chasing a ghost. He kept his colour wheel taped to the dashboard, a compass in a world that had lost its true north. Every time he felt his mind slippingâevery time he started to believe that the grass had always been redâhe looked at that wheel. He reminded himself of the truth.
By the third week of his journey, Abraxas reached the coordinates. He was deep in the deserts, miles from the nearest ghost town. The air here felt different. It didnât smell like sagebrush or dust.
He climbed on a high ridge, his boots crunching on white sand that should have been golden. When he reached the summit he stopped.
Below him, the world stopped making sense.
There was a massive, invisible wallâor perhaps a literal edge. A few hundred yards ahead, the desert simplyâŚended. It didnât crumble into a canyon or meet the sea. It ended in a flat, vertical expanse of nothingness. A vast, primed white void that stretched up into the copper sky and down into the white earth.
âThe horizon,â Abraxas whispered, his voice trembling. âItâs not a curve. Itâs a border.â
He ran towards it. As he got closer, he saw the âInversionâ in its rawest form. He saw a massive streak of blueâreal, true, beautiful blueârunning across the white void. It looked like a skyscraper-sized smear of paint.
He reached the edge of the world. He reached out a hand, expecting to feel air, of perhaps an energy shield.
Instead, his fingers touched something cold, slightly tacky, and immense. It felt like a wall of stretched fabric.
Then, he heard it.
It wasnât a sound from the desert. It was a sound from above. It was rhythmic, scratching noise, like a giant treading on dried leaves. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
The sky above himâthe copper skyâsuddenly darkened. A shadow the size of a continent fell over the desert. Abraxas looked up, his heart stopping in his chest.
A massive, wooden beamâmiles long and polished smoothâdescended from the heavens. It moved with a slow, terrifying grace. Attached to it were millions of fibres, each as thick as a redwood tree.
It was a brush.
And it was dripping with a globule of wet, cerulean liquid the size of an ocean.
Abraxas fell to his knees. The shadow of the brush was so vast it didnât just block the sun; it erased the concept of day. The âscritchâ he had heard earlier was replaced by a sound like a thousand tidal waves crashing at onceâthe sound of bristles meeting the atmosphere.
He looked up, and for the first timeâ his eyes pierced the âAtmosphere.â
It wasnât a sky. It was a ceiling of light, and beyond it, looming in the unthinkable distance, was a face. It was a face of impossible proportions, blurry and out of focus, as if seen through thick glass. The âgodâ was wearing a pair of headphones that looked like silver moons and was squinting down at the world with a look of mild, academic frustration.
âWeâre just a project,â Abraxas choked out. The air around him began to vibrate.
The giant brush descended. It hit the âhorizonâ a few miles to his left.
The impact didnât feel like an earthquake; it felt like a rewrite of physics. Where the bristles landed, the white void was instantly smothered by a thick, heavy layer of Ultramarine. The colour was so deep, so pure, that it hurt to look at. It wasnât blue as Abraxas knew itâthe inverted orangeâit was the Original Blue. The correction.
The student was repainting the sky.
Abraxas watched as a wave of wet, heavy pigment rolled across the desert like a lava flow of pure light. It consumed the copper sky, turning it back to azure of his childhood. It hit the âRed Forestâ in the distance, and as the shadow of the brush passed over the trees, the violent crimson vanished, smothered under a fresh, wet coat of Sap Green.
âWait!â Abraxas screamed, throwng his arms up towards the face in the heavens. âWeâre here! Weâre alive!â
But how do you hear the scream of a pigment? To the student, Abraxas was nothing more than a microscopic imperfection, a tiny speck of dust or a stray hair trapped in the previous layer of paint.
The brush moved again. This time, it was coming straight for the ridge where Abraxas stood.
H tried to run, but the air was growing thick. The smell of turpentine was now a physical weight, stinging his lungs, making his head spin. The world was being primed. He looked at his handsâhis orange-tinted, inverted hands. He saw the texture of his skin. Under the terrifyingly bright light of the studentâs studio, he didnât see pores or hair. He saw cross-hatching. He saw the delicate, fine lies of a 000-grade sable brush.
He wasnât a man made of flesh and bone. He was a series of clever strokes, a character designed to give life to a mid-term assignment.
The giant bristles, each one a pillar of dark fibre, slammed into the earth a mile away. The sound was rhythmic thud-squish.
Abraxas braced himself. He thought of his mother, sitting in her house with her blue roses. He realized with a jolt of horror that she wasnât worried in the way humans worryâshe was just painted that way. Her grief, his panic, Leoâs confusionâit was all just a study in âEmotional expression and Colour Theory.â
The wave of new paint reached him.
It was a wall of cold, viscous blue. It didnât hurt. It felt like being folded into a heavy silk blanket. As the cerulean wash passed over him, Abraxas felt his orange self dissolve. The orange jeans, the cyan skin, the frantic, inverted heartâthey were being buried.
For a second, he was suspended in the wetness of the paint. He looked up one last time.
The student had leaned back. Abraxas saw the giant reach for a giant, translucent containerâa coffee cup the size of a cityâto take a sip. The student looked bored.
âJust a little more highlight on the foreground,â a voice boomed. It wasnât a voice; it was a vibration that shook the atoms of the universe. It was the sound of a god checking the time. âThen I can turn this in and go to sleep.â
The world went quiet.
ââ
Abraxas opened his eyes. He was standing on the ridge in the desert.
The sky was blue. A perfect, boring, textbook blue.
The sand was gold.
The sun was yellow.
He looked down at his leg. His jeans were blue denim. He touched his face; his face was the warm, tan hue it had always been. He felt...perfect. He felt corrected.
But as he stood there, he realized he couldnât move his left arm. He tried to turn his head to look back at the white void, but his neck was stiff. In fact, he couldnât feel the wind anymore. He couldnât smell the sagebrush.
The world was beautiful, but it was static.
He looked out over the desert and saw Leo, or at least a figure that looked like Leo, standing near a car down the road. Leo was frozen in a pose of mid-cheer, his hand waving at the sky. He wasnât moving. He wasnât breathing.
Abraxas tried to speak, but his lips were sealed shut by a layer of high-gloss varnish.
High above, the âSunâ suddenly clicked off. The warmth vanished instantly, replaced by a cold, fluorescent hum.
âNot bad,â the God-voice echoed, sounding distant now, as if waking away from the table. âThe composition is a bit centered, but the colour correction saved it. C+ work, at least.â
A giant, heavy sheet of black plastic descended over the entie world, blocking out the studio lights.
Abraxas stood in the dark, a perfect man in a perfect blue world, trapped forever in the drying ink of a student who had already forgotten he existed. The mystery was solved. The colours were right.
And the world was finished.
-by me ( @somekindofparadoxhere )
Š Do not repost or publish without permission. Feel free to reblog.
