Combustion Hour

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You’ve been a long time away from home with its vast, pale stage of textured silk and the queen’s everywhere garden. There is only a binary of colors in your existence, just as you are supposed to narrow everything into the binary of target and not-target. Nevertheless, your language has words for colors. They are not red or ochre or azure. They are not even white or black, the logical defaults. But there is a word for the color of a string just as it is slit. Another for the color of the queen’s favorite flowers, which coil so promisingly from each doorway. One for the color of fire. That last is rarely spoken, especially in the queen’s presence.

Your uniform is the same color as the queen’s gloves; it is defined that way. The queen’s hands, they say of her knights. And now you’ve come back to the court with its thorn-collared tigers, its hawk-headed courtiers, its endlessly thwarted geodesics. The summons didn’t give a reason why your return was so urgent, but you can guess.

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