Fiction: Flight Between the Red and Blue by Chase Anderson

Photo Source: Unsplash

When the end of the world was first forewarned, you did nothing more than swish your tail. The others stared at the sun, rising beyond our mountains into a cornflower sky blooming ever-redder.

"This happens every summer," you said without concern. "Whatever lies beyond the horizon is none of our business."

You were one of the oldest in the herd, so all the yearlings took your words as permission to keep playing in grass still green from the spring rains. The first-time mothers and their wives eyed you warily, then craned their necks to see past the lilac peaks, for any seeds of danger they knew must be growing out of sight.

Your head remained low as you meander around the valley, cropping the grasses, as always. The only sign of speed you still carried was the shifting of weight from one slender leg to another.

***

When the stallion kept pulling back his lip to scent the air, the panicked fled. Their colts and fillies cried, forced to leave the only friends they'd ever known, the only air and insect song they'd ever ran.

The other mothers, the other wives asked for your thoughts on the sickeningly-sweet burn of wood on the wind and the unknown undertones flowing beneath. This wasn't your first home, far from your first stallion, should we heed his judgment, or decide for ourselves?

You snorted. "The only danger they ever watch for is another male," you told them. "Not beasts, nor storms, nor illness. He must face and fight his battles alone, but we do not."

You stepped slowly into the river, stood in the shallows where the clear-cold water could run over your fetlocks. The remaining foals splashed around you while their mothers searched the other side for any sign of our neighbors, the elk and the hare. Other animals that, too, only knew how to watch and run.

***

When the wind bore the tails of unfamiliar cries, the stallion fled with his favorites. A colt of only three summers declared himself our new stallion, but even he was too nervous to cover any mare. You were the only one who moved as if nothing had changed, with your same, placid pace, which greatly annoyed him.

"The sound is only the mountains’ ice breaking in this heat," you told him. "The rocks falling on the other side."

He was a paint, so he might give you a foal that looks like us both, your golden hide and my expanses of white. But you showed no interest. You had never fought off a stallion before, but your body carried a subtle tension all the same.

***

When sharp-cut shadows flitted inside the building stormclouds, the young stallion declared we would leave. Everyone was dancing in place, eyes rolling in every direction but down, searching for a danger just within sight.

"I'm not leaving my foals," you told him. He began to argue, but the older mares nudged him back. He was too young to know your story, and much too green to notice the thorns in your words.

He said nothing as you ambled to each spot they'd been born, moving or not, from your body or mine, yet falling still within a few days regardless. They’d all carried the same coat of mountain-capped white, eyes the pale blue of a cold spring sky, and all long turned into flowers and grass.

The same curse befell you and me regardless of our home, our stallion. The previous had heard the rumors and stopped wasting his efforts on us. All the mares and their unkind thoughts climbed out of the valley, leaving us with only dirty looks and tumbling scree. You still visited each patch of grass, for our foals and theirs.

***

When the shadows cling to the mountaintops, smoking shapes that melt the pristine snow, I awake to a crimson sky. The world is bright and cloudless, despite the sun reduced to a hazy star, its light desperately trying to reach us.

We’d slept on the ground, a foalish act with no herd to take watch, but there are no wolves left, no carrion birds. Even the fish in the river have chosen to flee.

I nudge you awake. We have to go, I say. I don't recognize the winged things that surround our valley, but I know inside my slender bones that they bear teeth and claws and death. The only things our kind can do are watch and run, and we grow short on time for either.

You take a moment to rise to your feet. Your head hangs low and relaxed while your legs remain in great tension. They wobble like a newborn foal who’d yet to learn the joy that is to run between the green and blue.

"Come to the river with me," you say, and I follow.

Its banks are high, the water fat from the mountains’ snow melted by the beasts. You blow air contentedly as the water runs past your hocks. The tension you hold lessens a breath, the water warm and dark from all the ash and silt and death running through its back.

I stand with you, even as the river runs darker and higher. I only step out to return upstream, allowing the charred wood and twisted, unnameable things to bump into my legs instead of yours.

You have no wisdom left to share, because, I now realize, I had always known. A thing shall still be even if no one found the words that can bear its shape.

We aren’t known for our words, after all.

There's only a moment of panic when the water licks against my belly. The air shudders from the wingbeats of the things careening in the bloodied sky they've surely born.

As the sun drops for the final time for our valley, the waters surge and you fall, as do I, and I can only wish we may run together again under a sky returned to blue.

Chase is a weird, queer, digital storyteller who writes weird, queer stories full of magic and monsters. He dropped out of chemical engineering to pursue journalism and escape calculus. But, as he's returned to school to study computer science and cybersecurity, he must face his old foe once again. He draws inspiration from biology, chemistry, novel attack vectors, and whatever his neurochemicals are up to today.  Find his writing and more at chasej.xyz

If you would like to learn more about Chase, you can also find him on Bluesky here.