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Colors didn’t reach inside Paragon.
The walls cast long, dark shadows every time the sun rose in the sky, slowly daring to reach its light inside the prison and then retreating back behind the massive black forms as day grew into dusk. It was suffocating, living amidst oppressive shade that swallowed him up every night.
Parrot hadn’t seen a sunrise in weeks. He stared at the tall walls, aching for a peek of colors across the sky, but the only ones splashed where he could see were dull echoes of what he knew was hidden from him.
He used to watch the sunrise with Wifies, back when life had been kinder and they both had been softer. He remembers following trails of clues, camping together on rough forest ground and sprinting to the edge of the wood to catch the sun when they woke. He remembers jumping through the end portal hand in hand, breaking from the dimension where they’d trapped themselves into a world of endless soft pastels and a sun waking from sleep. He remembers the last sunrise he’d seen before Paragon, when his talons had been bitten raw and everything was going wrong, but he’d paused to see the sky break into orange and peach and have a moment to himself to breathe.
Everything was different in Paragon. Either his mind played tricks or the very world had changed itself to drag him further from hope.
The sky looked gray and pale from the ground, even with beams of sun stretching across it. The clouds were white. The walls were black, the trees were black, and the ground was black, and it devoured him every time he looked down at it. Wifies was gray, grayer than he’d ever been, like the coat of the dog he’d dropped into the void, and Parrot felt the color leeching from himself too the longer he stayed. The mountaintops were white and the foam on the false sea was white and the spots behind Parrot’s eyelids were white, bursting and burning as he ground his teeth together and fought to ground his sanity too.
Gray gray gray. Bright feathers turned dim, torn apart by silver shears. Silver like the blade pressed against his first knuckle as Wifies deliberated if declawing him was a safety or a danger. Parrot had seen his own reflection in it and searched for a hint of life in his gray, gray eyes as he held as still as stone.
Parrot hadn’t seen a sunrise in weeks, and life without was colorless.
-
Parrot sat atop obsidian walls. His legs were folded to his chest, his wings lay behind him, and in front of him there was color.
Pink stretched across the sky. Orange dripped between the clouds and yellow burst along the horizon. A ball of fire hung in the center.
Parrot sat atop the walls like they still contained him even as he rose above them. He held his aching muscles back from the edge so as to not intrude on the world before him. A harsh border was drawn between two spaces, and Parrot knew which side he belonged on.
Parrot didn’t know how to bring himself back into the world that had kept on moving while he was stuck. What was the first step? What was the second? How much had he missed, and how much would he drown while trying to catch up again?
There was no hand to guide him, and no hand to take in his own. There was no one to help. No one even to control his unwilling actions. No one atop the walls or anywhere else who knew what to do with him.
He was struck by the vastness of the decision hanging before him. It felt huge, insurmountable, too difficult to see completely. It paralyzed him.
He sat in place, stiff and frozen, as the sun continued its route across the sky. The shadows in Paragon lengthened and stretched, but Parrot was away from it all, one with the pale sky as wind whistled around him.
He brought his wings out wide, opening them painfully to catch the air that dipped beneath the feathers. His muscles burned. Bones ached. Feathers that would never again grow right shifted and pulled.
Parrot closed his eyes and imagined he was flying once more, high above the ground, away from the troubles that had plagued him so heavily. He angled his wings this way and that, tipping to each side, feeling the air currents and how wrong they were against the bareness of ruined flight. It was almost correct, but so off that the pretending made him nauseous.
The guards had not met him here. He did not expect they would, and he was glad for it. He never wanted to see them again. Maybe that was selfish. Maybe it wasn’t selfish enough. Maybe he should have hunted them down for their actions, but that idea only made him want to sink down further against the obsidian.
He only wanted them to leave. Leave, like he should have already, but hadn’t managed to yet.
Parrot felt the colors bleed across his wings as the sun beamed its light down from the heavens. His wings lowered as the muscles gave out. He sat there, silent and scarred, and he imagined how it would feel to decay alongside the prison.
The walls of his pathetic house would cave in, the lava moat would cool, even the obsidian walls would wear away in the elements, and still it wouldn’t compare to the ruin Parrot felt in every inch of his soul.
He didn’t want to leave it behind. Not entirely. He didn’t want to leave the only place he felt he could keep remembering Wifies. The world outside was cruel and cold, and knew nothing of his suffering. The world had moved on, while the prison had contained them both. Paragon was deception made physical, but it had been fond of Wifies like Parrot once was, and it knew all their painful secrets. It didn’t judge him for missing his friend.
He gripped at his shoulders and tried to find the white and black of Paragon in the forest ahead. It was too green, too golden, too bright. It was not meant for him.
Once, his wings had fit there. Then they’d turned ill with the gray of the Director, tainted and marred, and Parrot thought the forest would hate him now. Parrot hated the forest, devoid of all thoughts of Wifies despite the ugly walls that loomed in its center. Only Parrot carried the memories, and they weighed heavy.
Parrot had been left to shrivel and rot. Alone. He wondered if the explosions in the chamber had burst orange and red, or if they’d only been blinding and ashy.
The sun had moved behind him already. The sky was dusty, darkening blue. The night fell, and it was black.
Parrot moved in its cover. He fell from the walls and plunged into waters he couldn’t see through. His lungs choked on the cold as he surfaced and moved to the bank. The moon was cut in half overhead, and Parrot thought it was fitting. He held a thumb to the sky and blotted out its light, then let it fall and squinted so it was all that he could see.
Dark and light. Balance. Balance was a confusing thing. He wondered if he and Wifies had balanced each other out, once, or if they were always dragged in a direction that would leave someone dead.
The moon flooded the world in gray.
It wasn’t the gray of Paragon. It was silvery warm, alive and bright, alight with the energy of living and free things. Crickets chirped when they had always sounded muffled in Paragon, the shape of a bat swooped between trees, and somewhere in the distance a wolf howled. Grass rustled as he pushed through it, grown long and dense. Everything was unbothered by what Parrot had endured. It was suffocating, and it was refreshing, like pure, clean water that still choked his lungs.
Parrot moved through the night with an aching body, feeling wrong and strange, a sharp silhouette cast against a soft skyline.
When the sun surfaced on the horizon Parrot curled his broken feathers around himself as a shield against the world. Hours later, he learned how to draw them back. He learned to live in the light of a normal world again, bit by bit, without recoiling like it burned.
His chest still ached, his whole being screaming for something that had been lost. He wanted to start over and he wanted to go back. He wanted nothing to ever happen again, and he wanted to do everything new he could think of. He was torn in two ways, or maybe in a thousand, like he’d shattered alongside Wifies.
Later, Parrot would wonder if he was drawn to the End because, in some way, it reminded him of the prison. When he’d spilled into the dimension, a mess of weakened limbs and stuttering movements, it was the closest he’d felt to Paragon in days. The sky was dark, the endstone pale, the face of some guardian watching him like a captor.
Parrot didn’t linger. He moved through like a ghost, not letting his slippery awareness latch onto anything too strongly before he was already moving past it. No one stopped him as he tipped into the portal.
The sky was bright in his vision. He’d seen the sun in Paragon, seen it at noon in the boiling midday that wanted to burn the fight out of him, and it had always been blinding. It was nothing like the softness of the sunrises that had been stolen from him.
When he hit the ground he truly thought he had traded his death in Paragon for an identical other. The details stop mattering much when one is broken to bits mere days past escaping the same fate. Would anyone really have cared that Parrot had extended his life by such a small amount, had clung on for a bit longer before succumbing to his inevitable fate? Wither skulls burst through the air, deafening roars vibrating through his clenched teeth, colliding in explosions like those that had torn the Director apart.
Parrot fought tooth and nail to drag himself away from the chaos, burnt at the edges, bleeding apart, adrenaline in his veins, leaving with his life but only barely.
Paragon clung to him and seeped into the cracks of his mind, as it would for the rest of his life. It was dark and dim over his vision even as Parrot forged ahead through bright, bursting color.
He reached out a hand and somehow, miraculously, another met it, pulling him on as he ran blind. An unfamiliar presence, awkward and strange once they slowed, but just what Parrot needed against the echoes of Paragon lingering in the air.
That night he watched the sunset with Theo.