Young Writers Society

I’d always liked Airship-travel.

I guess it was the movement. The sense of being hundreds of feet above the ground. The sense that you could look down on everything as if you were a star. Gazing, from the cabin window, upon whatever mountains or oceans we might have been passing, made me feel like I was going somewhere, like I was part of something majestic.

I hadn't bothered going out on deck. After all, I was travelling on an Airship owned by Kaleidoscope, where you would never be able to speak to anyone you might meet on the cruise. You could only speak in Colour.

I’d spent seven months out in Libya, sweltering in the middle of the desert, and trying to force my way around the place, frantically hailing various drivers with my crappy Arabic, and spending nights in dodgy hotels, which, had they been in Kaleidoscope City, I would have never looked twice at.

Overall, I felt like bloody awful, and I wouldn't have been able to suffer tedious conversations in Colour with whoever might be travelling with me.

So this was why I had holed myself up in my cabin, sitting on the single bunk bed that took up half the room, and watched the magnificent Brittany Alps that passed lazily beneath me.

The rumbling moan of the engine reverberated through the walls.

A sickly sweet smell drifted upwards from the kitchen below.

Almost idly, I raised my right hand which was fixed with a glimmering, cube shaped contraption, glowing playfully with an ethereal green light. It was my LightScape, which I’d owned since I was seventeen. I knew it had been through a lot over the last few months. It wasn't the best idea to put it through more use.

But to be honest I really didn't care.

I raised it, tracing various electrical shapes through the air, laced with shimmering green energy.

Circles

Squares

Rectangles

And my Lightscape pulsated green with the effort.

Before I lazily dismissed them with a flick of my hand and the shapes burst into grey dust.

***

Imagine if you could create anything.

Imagine if you could take the very paint from which nature is constructed and shape it to your will.

This is what I and millions of others have been blessed with. To create

For almost eighty years, since the asteroid fell to Earth, the United Colour Spectrum Democracy has held the majority of the Tektra deposits around the world, and it’s a good job that we did, or we would never have been able to mass produce half of the LightScapes that my people use today.

My mum often told me about how we could have very easily been the ones on the bottom end of the spectrum. How, if explorers like James Winter and Sierus Red hadn’t ventured north into the Northern lands to recover deposits of Tektra for us, then we probably couldn’t have won the Colour War.

When told this, any other kid would have drifted off to sleep in seconds. But I got this inordinately nerdy thrill from mum’s history lessons. But that was far from the only thing I loved about her. To be honest, my mum was the most wonderful person I ever knew. She loved everyone, and was loved by everyone. She was beautiful, with her ash blonde hair, and her sea blue eyes. Her beauty did not make her in any way spiteful, which was a rare thing. She gave me the best advice for my own life as well. Telling me how I should find my matching colour. How everyone has a matching colour, and it might come from the strangest of places.

I think about that piece of advice a lot. And when I do I think, “Oh Mum you could have never imagined where my matching colour came from.” which always makes me smile. For it did come from the most unexpected place that you could imagine.

But all this was all before she died.