The Blue Whisper

I. The Forbidden Shade

No one in the village spoke of the color blue.

It was not just forgotten—it was erased.

The sky, a dull gray. The river, a lifeless black. Even the flowers in the fields bloomed in shades of yellow and red but never blue.

Eiji had grown up with the same warnings as every child:

"What is absent must remain unnamed."

"When depths call with forgotten voices, seal your ears."

"The circle of stones holds emptiness; let your gaze pass over it."

And so, he never questioned it.

Eiji was a dutiful son—the kind who helped his father with the rice harvest and never complained when his fingers blistered under the hot sun. He was quiet, watchful, the opposite of his sister Nao, whose laughter echoed through their small house like wind chimes. Where Eiji observed, Nao explored. Where he accepted, she

questioned.

Perhaps that was why, when autumn came and the village elders performed the Annual Binding—the ritual that had kept them safe for seven generations—Nao had whispered to him: "Don't you ever wonder what blue looked like?"

Until the day his sister disappeared.

II. The Well That Should Not Be Seen

It happened in the early morning.

The wind had been unusually strong that night, rattling the wooden shutters of their home. The air carried a strange metallic scent, like water left too long in a copper pot. Eiji had barely slept, turning in his futon as a strange, distant sound echoed through his dreams—like a voice, but too soft, too delicate. The sound reminded him of ice cracking on the river in winter—sharp yet somehow musical.

When he woke up, the front door was wide open.

And his sister, Nao, was gone.

The village elders searched the forest. The men combed the riverbanks. The women whispered among themselves, shaking their heads.

"It's been seventy years since the last one," Eiji overheard Old Woman Tanaka murmur. "The pact is weakening."

But Eiji already knew where Nao had gone.

The old well.

It sat at the far edge of the village, behind the shrine where no prayers were spoken anymore. It was ancient, made of cracked stone, covered in thick wooden planks, nailed shut. The moss surrounding it was a sickly yellow, never green, certainly never blue.

No one ever went near it.

Because long ago, the well had been the last place someone had seen blue—the night the village head's daughter had leapt inside, claiming the sky was calling her home.

Eiji's heart pounded as he approached. The wind had picked up again, curling around him like unseen fingers. His throat tightened with each step, as if an invisible hand were squeezing it.

And then—he saw it.

A single blue ribbon, caught on the well's broken wood.

Nao's ribbon.

His breath hitched. His hands trembled as he reached forward—

And then, the planks groaned.

A long, drawn-out sound, like something shifting deep below. The sound vibrated through the soles of his feet, up his legs, settling in his chest like a second heartbeat.

The nails, rusted and ancient, began to bend.

A thin whisper curled up from the darkness.

"Eiji… you see it too, don't you?"

His blood ran cold.

That was Nao's voice.

But something was wrong.

Nao had always spoken with warmth, with light. Her words bubbling forth like spring water. But this voice…

It was hollow.

Distant.

Too far away to be human.

Eiji stepped back.

The planks snapped.

A gust of wind rushed from the well, carrying something strange with it—something light, something weightless. The smell hit him first—sweet and rotten at once, like overripe fruit left in summer heat.

Something blue.

Tiny, delicate blue petals lifted into the air, spiraling around him.

Eiji froze.

Blue. The forbidden shade. The color that should not exist.

And yet, there it was, floating before him.

A single petal landed on his arm.

And then—his skin burned.

The pain was instant, sharp and cold, like ice sinking into his veins. He gasped, clutching his wrist, trying to wipe it away. The burning spread up his arm, prickling like a thousand needles.

But the petal did not move.

It sank in.

The veins beneath his skin darkened, shifting into a deep, inhuman blue.

And suddenly—

He remembered.

III. The Memory That Was Stolen

A sky, endless and deep. A river, flowing with sapphire light. A field, stretching in waves of brilliant blue.

Eiji clutched his head as the memories poured into him. The scent of rain on blue flowers. The coolness of blue shadows on a summer day. The gentle blue haze of early morning.

Colors he had never seen. Colors he had always known.

The village had not always been like this.

There was a time when blue had been everywhere.

But then they came.

The ones who whispered from the depths.

The ones who lived in the well.

They were not human.

They were color itself.

And they were hungry.

Not for flesh or blood—but for memory, for experience, for the very essence of perception.

Eiji saw it clearly now. In the time of his great-grandmother, when the drought had nearly destroyed the village, the priest had found ancient scrolls speaking of beings who could change the very fabric of reality.

The village had made a pact. Sacrifice the color blue, and they would be spared.

Eachizu, they called them—the color-eaters. Spirits that fed on human perception.

So they drained the sky, the rivers, the flowers—their own memories.

And now, the blue had been waiting.

Waiting for someone to see it again.

Waiting for someone to bring it back.

Eiji's breath came in ragged gasps. His tongue tasted copper and salt. The whisper from the well grew louder.

"Eiji… it's so beautiful… won't you come down? Won't you see?"

He looked up—

And Nao stood at the edge of the well.

Or at least…

Something that looked like her.

Her skin was pale, tinged with deep cerulean veins. Her eyes, once dark and warm, were now endless pools of blue—not the blue of shallow water, but the blue of abyssal depths where light has never reached.

Her smile stretched too wide.

Too empty.

The air around her shimmered like heat rising from summer roads, but cold—so cold that Eiji's breath formed clouds before him.

"The sky used to be blue, remember?" she whispered. "Let's bring it back. They're so hungry, Eiji. They've been waiting for so long."

And then—

She reached for him.

IV. The Last Choice

Eiji stumbled backward, his mind screaming at him to run, but his feet felt frozen in place. The smell of ozone filled the air—sharp and electric, the scent of impossibility.

Behind Nao, the well yawned open.

It was no longer just a hole in the earth.

It was a vast, endless sky.

A sky that should not exist.

A sky that wanted him back.

The petals swirled faster, wrapping around his body, filling his lungs, his mind—

And in that moment, he understood.

The color blue was never erased.

It was swallowed.

And now it wanted to swallow the world.

The Eachizu hadn't come to steal the color—they had come to become it. To spread through human perception like a poison.

And if he let go, if he stopped fighting—

It would swallow him too.

Nao tilted her head, still smiling.

"Come, Eiji. Don't you want to be together again? Like when we were children, looking up at the—" Her voice hitched, the word momentarily lost to her.

"Sky," she finally said, the word sounding foreign on her tongue.

Her hand, impossibly cold, touched his wrist. The touch burned like

frostbite, sending pain shooting up his arm.

And he saw, in perfect clarity—

His own reflection in her eyes.

A boy who was no longer gray.

A boy whose veins had already turned blue.

A boy who had already been taken.

"No," he whispered, a final act of defiance. "This isn't what blue is supposed to be."

But his sister—or what had once been his sister—only smiled wider.

"Of course it is," she said. "Blue has always been hungry. Blue has always wanted everything."

The last thing he heard before the sky devoured him whole was a voice, soft and sweet, whispering in his ear:

"Isn't it beautiful? The color of appetite. The shade of emptiness."

V. The Village That Forgot Again

The next morning, the village was silent.

The well was sealed once more, new planks nailed tightly in place by hands that would not remember driving them.

No one remembered Nao.

No one remembered Eiji.

Kotori, the young daughter of the rice merchant, walked to school along the path that passed the Maeda house. Every day for as long as she could remember, she had followed this route. But today, something felt different.

She paused, staring at the small house with its sliding door partly open. Somehow, it looked wrong—too empty, too quiet. Had someone lived there? She thought she remembered a boy about her brother's age. What was his name? And hadn't there been a girl too?

Kotori rubbed her temples. A headache was forming behind her eyes.

"Kotori-chan! Don't dawdle!" her mother called from behind.

"Mother," Kotori said, pointing at the house, "who lives there?"

Her mother's eyes slid over the building as if it were nothing more than a shadow. "No one important," she said, her voice oddly flat. "Come along now."

As they walked away, Kotori felt something catch in her hair. She reached up and pulled free a small petal—a strange color she couldn't quite name. Not quite purple, not quite green.

For a moment, she thought she heard something—a voice, telling her to look up at the sky.

But when she did, she saw only the familiar gray.

That evening, the village elder added two more warnings to tell the children:

"What is absent must remain unnamed."

"When depths call with forgotten voices, seal your ears."

"The circle of stones holds emptiness; let your gaze pass over it."

"The ceiling of the world wears a mask; do not seek its true face."

"The familiar that returns with strange eyes is no longer known to you."

But the words themselves began to fade with each telling, like ink washing away in rain.

And at the edge of the village, the old well waited.

Patient.

Hungry.

Eternal.

Kotori dreamed that night of a boy and a girl walking together, looking up at something vast and beautiful above them. In her dream, the boy turned to her, his eyes filled with a color she had never seen.

"Remember," he seemed to say, though his lips didn't move.

When she woke, she found a single petal on her pillow.

And if you listened carefully, you might hear the whisper.

"The sky used to be blue, remember? And soon, everything will be."