Blue is the color of life, Mavra had said.

As they arrived in the Karis system, Jehen watched the steady blue glow at the planet’s curve. Space shaded from lightless black, the color of Nothing near absolute zero, to the shade still called midnight by old tradition, to purplish-blue, then  flared into unbearably bright ultramarine. The edge was lost in a blaze of blue-white at the horizon where the sunlight of Karis caught it.

As they moved in closer, that light showed floating layers of cloud, the atmospheric system that not only supported life but made it burgeon. Those great spirals were made of the tops of the legendary cloud-towers of Karis.

As the Ship bore them ever closer to their destination, Vlada Ship’s-Heart showed them the picture through the full spectrum, zoomed in to show electric and gamma-ray discharge into space from the mighty storm-whorls over the True Ocean of Karis.
All of the names they had for blue, all of them came from the Original World.

***

From Part II, in which Jehen and her siblings are sent to the starship academy.

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