1. Five Shades of White
There were many colors in the world and many more shades and tints to each one, but the most beautiful, the most painful, were seen only in the sky where the mind's eye ruled. The clouds, oceans of them, their undertow calming and gentle, deadly at the border to the Grand Stream, enfolded them and they contented to be held deep within the concealing embrace. Seen from the flight deck, they were gray and all its shades, bluish sometimes, white others, and when they were high enough, aglow.
The rainbirds, majesty and grace in flight, their songs and wings only revealing of their presences, bittersweet visions in the mind as they trailed them through the streams on the safer flight paths, white plumage and sunlit wings flashing like the Morse Code from the vanship's navigator headlight in memory, pulsing images of olive blossom scented memory. And just as cold as flying out in the streams was the ice that sat in his hand, floating upon the brandy and reflecting the rays stabbing through the glow of the vast vapor forms outside, absorbing the light as the brandy swallowed them and was downed in turn to take on an inner frosted glow of a cold burn.
The truest 'shade' of it, the whitest of all whites, were the knuckles as he gripped the command chair's arms, his brandy, Yuris and the olive flowers in her identically scented hair tearing through his mind, eyes shut in useless attempts to block it out. When he remembered, they grew whiter than anything ever to have existed, than the hottest flash of pain of either at the memory of her; she held strong suspicion his burn could out-do the knobs on his hands. It hurt to look at his hands, pale already as he was from years of seclusion and thin because of it. Yuris. How that name stabbed at them. To each a different pain, excruciating emptiness at the realizations of never-to-bes as her absence tore her forever from him and his pride forever from her.
The source of both their pain, all the world's, the Goddess Queen bathed in white behind, at the center of, the world as she lived shielded in her white castle floating in the clearest of skies among the whitest of clouds and purest of sparkling waters; the epitome of all that they strived to change, the object of all their hate. Up here, even the beautiful and beloved images represented in that which was all colors always led back to their purpose, to her, and to her. For them, for herself and him, that which represented their ache, that constantly reminded them at every turn, that was so heartbreakingly beautiful in all its forms and shades, was white.