No more—so had Felysia’s first emperor declared then, a millennia past, as he stood amidst the waning glow of the setting sun. No more were our people to suffer the rapacious numbness of the cold, no more were we to succumb to the ravenous deliriousness of hunger, for he, clothed in fluttering robes glittering yellow, had united the lands for the first time. And so he had coined the term huángdì, Felysian for “the yellow emperor,” his own name huáng minted in it for all time to come; so too had he minted the world’s first coins, their gold glint reaching across mountains and oceans until their washer shape had become no less than the shape of money itself. Nature had gifted to him the Yellow River, its spring waters painted canary as they carried the blessings of the earth to every granary and rice paddy on its shores from western to eastern Felysia.

When the tiny bird had flown to the world colored yellow, I’m sure that’s what she saw: the yellow of royalty, the yellow of gold and glory, the yellow of the earth, and the yellow of our skin, of our cheeks as we smiled. But to the Alverians, it had meant something so different. To be yellow-skinned was to be sick, to be filthy; yellow was the hair dye of the uneducated, the choice of wallpaper for the insane. Your sacrifices, Mother’s laments—day after day, smoke after smoke, the words containing them would clatter endlessly between closed bedroom doors. To have given up your life savings, your opportunities, your family—Mother had lost no less, I’m sure—all for nothing, all for something which had resided only betwixt the molecules of the air and the jaundice smog of your unbreakable addiction—it must have been frustrating. And it was frustrating for me as well, for the only tales the sylphs had told were those of laughter and puns: the laughter of mocking tongues, the puns of our strange names in the mouths of the Alverians, all while your colleagues from work would waddle, knee-depth in the mud of their ignorance, your expertise in the subject only a momentary bubble rising from the depths, the same depths in which you had long since drowned.

And what was I to contribute to this melting pot bubbling the brown of loss? A friend and a foe and a childhood memory was all, for my first days in Alveria were spent in the corner of Miss Wright’s kindergarten class, all too friendless and even more foeless. Only one glazed memory remains from that corner beneath the white window: that is, the rhythmic shifting of foreign glyphs, left then up and right, left then up and right again, as my illiterate eyes glossed over them, robot-like to liken to the robotic scanning of the missus as she enforced reading hour. But really, into the pot of sacrifice went no more than a thousand suns of my childhood—for you and Mother, the fares of the ferry to Alveria had been over six times as hefty.

“For your future,” you had answered me, time and time again. It was a question never asked, a responsibility never forgotten.

Fonte was the name of our little town, its name written with Alverian glyphs which meant the spring of water. And it was spring, always spring, when we would make that trek to the Alverian coastline, nearly a day’s worth of walking. By the time we saw the waters, there would have remained just enough light to bid the sun another goodbye as it returned across the ocean, surely to the welcome of our family across the water. That evening, there we sat, together, the three of us, a mother, a father, and a son, gazing into the sunset as its dandelion hue faded into lavender. I would point a lone index finger toward the horizon and ask, “Is that where granny and granpy are?” Your yellowed left hand would envelop my right, black veins and the smallest of wrinkles unmistakable even to my young self, grounding my palm back into the sand. You must have nodded in affirmation shortly after, because I remember squinting, edging forward my buttocks ever so slightly, looking for any sign of anything familiar in that purple haze of the unknown. Surely, someone had been looking back at the same time, someone from the land of the golden earth.

I owed you, I know. I owed you your past, now thrust into the melting pot; I owed you your future, now lost amongst ridicule. I owed you and Mother so much, so heavily, it weighed upon every step I took, every breath I breathed. At day, I would cast a spell upon the entirety of Fonte, transforming the birches and the oaks into the banyans of home, their bearded branches draping down into the dirt to create a dense greenery. I would cast down the surburban townhouses into shanty shacks of tall and short, the cramped spaces in between serving as perfect places of vertical play. The sharp edges of the churches rounded into droplets; the people shrunk in height, now speaking the same language as you and Mother. At night, you would tutor me in the maths. I knew, and you knew: that only skill in the quantitative would command respect amongst strangers, not words, not drawings, not music, for those were too soft, too easily mocked, too often disregarded. The Felysian and Alverian languages shared none but the numbers; it was through them, through scores written in the common digit, undeniable in the face of derision and cultural distance, that I was to succeed.

All this, just so that I could repay a debt I never chose to bear. All this, and I still couldn’t remember what our hometown had really looked like, smelled like, tasted like. All this, just so that I wouldn’t forget why.

Still, as much as I tried to retain our memory, our culture, it had begun to fade with each new Alverian word I learned. Branch by branch, building by building, my re-enchantment upon the world was crumbling. Between the burden of sacrifice and the burden of dissimilation I had found a repose, situated not seven paces from the missus’s classroom corner. It was a picture book without words, a balance between the two tongues I had learned simultaneously; certainly not the mathematics textbook you would have had me read, but it spoke to me nonetheless. There, on its pages, a tiny bird flew, her wings’ solid outlines singing a language so naturally lucid to me as she fluttered. To visit the worlds of all different colors was her desire, and to fulfill that wish was my command, as I wove colors from the rainbow into feather after feather.

With feathers colored the yellow of home, onward she flew onto page two. There slept the great high seas, whose beckoning waves I colored blue.

The sea reflects the blue of the sky.
The blue reflection is the sea of the sky.
The sea of the sky cries blue tears.
Among those blue tears, the tiny bird flies.^[1]

If I could ask you one thing, it would be, “Was it really so difficult?”

It is the color of police lights. It is the color of the caduceus, the winged staff held by two serpents intertwined. It was the color of the tendrils of water which pulled me downward, further and further. It was my basement window, shattering into a million pieces under the waning afternoon light.

It is the color of the moon, the color of fresh snowflakes, the color of her eyes.

The winter of ’15 was cold, and it was even colder in Dragonstail. Not too long after I had left our house, I was recruited by the Commerce Guild. Wisked away to Alveria’s coldest reaches on the fastest train available, I had felt valued for the first time in my life. Accompanied personally by the head of the guild at the time, the newest recruits and I were headed towards the one place in Alveria close enough to observe the northern skies with clarity: Dragonstail.

After all, even you would know: he who observes the star of the north learns the patterns of the winds and waters for days to come. The guild was only the most cunning of its watchers, the omniscient invisible hand over Alveria which would utilize this knowledge to balance the forces of production and consumption in the agricultural markets, across times of varying efficiency. Equipped with a team of quantitative talent, the influence of our work in inference had extended past the markets and into policy as well, catching even the eyes of Alveria’s royal family as they addressed famine and droughts alike. That I had joined them, I’m sure, would nearly reach the heights of your wishes for my success.

But, I had fallen short, then, every time before, and every time since. “We are the only ones who will love you unconditionally, we are the only ones who will criticize you,” Mother had spoken once, “because those who do not listen, those who do not care, those who do not love, will never have any criticism for what you show them.” Unbeknownst to you and Mother, from the fragments remaining of my Felysian enchantment, I had created a world for myself, existing far away from your omnipresent scathing commentary. With each passing day, with each passing critique, I would fall further and further out of the reaches of your observation, until I had retreated into that dusty basement of our house, that shining world of my creation. As punishment, you took away everything from me, but you couldn’t take my mind. In that prison I could dream, a frog at the bottom of his well looking through a lone cobalt window toward the sky, those elementary mathematical proofs you had taught me the only puzzle pieces I could play with in my world. For days on end I would refuse to leave, be it for school, for food, or for anyone. You were disappointed, and Mother was furious.

The day the police came, Mother was so, so angry. Leaning, hands against the basement door, I had pushed with the weight of my life, Mother swiping in that little space just above the floor with her kitchen knife. I was scared, I was angry too, and with a blade from the basement, I struck at the door. But instead of scaring her, instead of hurting her, I had hurt myself instead, the back end of the blade slicing into the base of my index finger, the same finger with which had pointed toward our homeland so many years ago. Hearing my scream, Mother must have stopped, and you must have called for help, the glowing blue of the caduceus appearing outside my window no later than the approaching shrill of police sirens.

Each year, the coasts of Dragonstail would flood just once. When the waters came, they would wash away everything: crustaceans, castles, and condos alike. But every other day, it was beautiful: a sea without end, a sky without bounds. Still, no one ever tried to build a house on that beach, knowing all too well that they would lose it, all too soon. Every time you had yelled at me, every time Mother had banged on my door, every time I had heard the two of you arguing, the waves had come yet again, raging, unrelenting, all-consuming. It seemed that nothing I had built would ever last.

And so, inevitably, that day, amidst all the screaming and ringing and flashing and blaring, I had sought to run away. With a crack, I broke through the only barrier to my freedom, and through the kaleidoscope of falling glass came gushing in the blue of an afternoon light. I ran and ran and ran, farther away from our house than I had ever known existed, my white tee stained red as I clutched my bleeding hand. When night fell, I had found myself calmed once again by the winter wind, with only the chirps of cicadas and the caws of crows accompanying me as I looked down to the river from the only bridge in Fonte. That night, through the reflections upon the rapids, the moon had shown to me her true self. Come in, she had said, come in, come in, she had moved her mouth, but all I saw was Mother’s mouth, all I heard were Mother’s cruel words, echoing, resonating, bouncing around in my head, all in my head, as I tried to escape, desperately, so desperately.

Someone dragged me out of the river that night. They fed me, took care of my wound, and helped me to the guild examinations when it finally came three days later. The devil who had been haunting my life must have taken pity that day. As much as I wanted to forget my childhood, it seems like what math you taught me had stuck. But from everything else to do with you and Mother, I had run away.

Thinking back, I only ever wanted one thing from you.

Proof. Proof that you listened, proof that you cared, proof that you loved. To me. About me. Me.

If I could ask you one thing, it would be, “Was it really so difficult?”

Yes, of course it was difficult, to leave behind your family, your opportunities, your wealth, to immigrate across the waters to an unknown future. But was it really so difficult just to say, “I love you”?

I suppose it must have been.

It was difficult for me, too.

She was my first love: eyes like a clear Dragonstail sky, passion like the fires of hell. Burning red! So cool! Mother would have thought her short-tempered, but I liked that side of her as well. I know she wasn’t perfect, but to me she was.

I met her a few weeks before I left the guild. There, they had kept asking for proof for everything I suggested: proof that the theorem was correct, proof for its practicality in the markets, proof that it would work in the future. But I wasn’t brought up like the rest of them, the math I had learned from you, by myself—it was peice by piece, not class by class. I could show them how it all fit together, how it was shaped in my mind, but it wasn’t enough. They wanted to see it in the framework they had developed, and they wanted a guarantee for its correctness. I could only provide an intuition—the more difficult of proofs were beyond my informal training.

I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough for you and Mother, I wasn’t enough for Felysia, and I wasn’t enough for the Alverians at the guild either.

But perhaps, for her, for a brief moment, I might have been good enough.

In the summer of ’21, the guild sent me to capital city Erlija to oversee our investment in the dam construction contracted by the Alverian government. She was a waitress at the Cat’s Tail Inn where I stayed. It wasn’t her appearance or voice which first caught my attention, but rather the geese she was feeding during her break—they wore such a lovely white but quacked so terribly too! She spoke to them no differently than she would you or me, and when she did, their hissing (did you know geese hissed?) would cease, their small webbed feet paddling them to her side, their fluffy bodies surely hoping for a pat, or, even better, some lettuce from the kitchen! Had you seen geese back in Felysia?

When the dam was finally built, and I was to return to Dragonstail, I decided to resign from the guild instead. Autumn in Erlija was breezy with the golden wind of falling leaves and the freshness of the lukewarm afternoon rain smelling like new books. She and I seemed to share in our senses of humor. Her date ideas were the worst! But walking along the dirt roads of outer Erlija, getting peppered with mud from the wagons speeding by—somehow, it was so, so fun when she was around. In-between my tutoring shifts at Erlija College, she brought me to museums and performances alike, and I tried to introduce her to my friends from the guild during their trips to Erlija. You could say she tamed me like she did those geese, but that’s not quite it. See, the summer she worked at the inn, she was saving up for a ticket across the high seas. No, not to Felysia, but to our island neighbors in Lexaria—the land red of the rising sun. And of Felysia’s history with the islanders—well, to me, they were just Lexarians; to you, they were the island devils. I’m sure, if I had witnessed what you saw back in Felysia, I would think the same. But maybe the burden was too heavy for a tiny bird to carry. She—well, she was as unshackled as ever—the night she brought me to a concert performed by her favorite Lexarian band, I had referred to them as the island devils, and she, not knowing the history, had simply remarked, “What a cool band name!”

And it would have been, especially for such a cool band. I had a blast at the concert.

Back then, you would always have something for me to do. No sooner had I returned from school, it would have been the textbooks, then exercise, then Mother’s dinner, then studying again. It wasn’t much different at the guild—there were always so many strategies to analyze, so many forecasts to try. Twice, now, I’ve left everything behind—although, each time, I had never felt as if I lost anything, only that I had nothing to begin with. After she left for Lexaria, I searched and searched, and kept looking for something, anything, that would get me out of bed each morning. But without you, without Mother, without the guild, without her, it had felt so, so empty.

It was only when I visited the geese again that I thought, maybe my passion is also red like hers, my creativity just as vibrant.

You had always taught me that we Felysians should mince our words—after all, the less that is said, the more which is meant.

I never finished that picture book from Miss Wright’s kindergarten class, but here’s how I imagine it might end, if it were written in Felysian.

Ahead the tiny bird flew,
Flying on wings of yellow and blue.
Ahead she flew into the world red of passion,
Coloring her wings red, colors mixing into ashen.
But black was too heavy, and onto her wings it would weigh.
When she could fly no longer, she would only say:
I’m glad I spread my wings,
I’m glad I flew away.

Take care of Mother, will you, Father? And you know this already, but do lay off the smoking. I’ve attached some money for the basement window and hole in the door. Sorry.

Love,
————

[1]: Translated by Hanzie from Japanese from Episode 1 of the Black★Rock Shooter TV series.