Our Lit - a novel by Li Tchaikov

Prologue · 123,052 A.D.

Many years later, when the lost jungle had been won back into the light and the prophecy had ripened from a hope into the history it had always meant to become, the people of Terra Aurora would still tell their luminos about the dawn the old King put out his own light - and they would tell it the way you tell a thing too large to carry whole, in pieces, by the colour of it: how the gold had stood there alone above the glowing jungle and then gone, and how the whole spectrum had chosen, light after light, to follow it down into a darkness Terra Aurora had never once laid upon itself before that morning, and has never quite forgiven since.

It was, they said, the one night the people put out their own lights on purpose - a hundred thousand years of glowing kind choosing the absence of their own radiance for the length of a single grief.

- from the Prologue of Our Lit

Chapter One · Hunting

Dawn had not yet found its way down to the floor of the world, and so the jungle wore the light it had made for itself: moths the breadth of two open hands drifting in slow lavender shoals between trunks ten metres around, the night orchids breathing low gold out of their open throats, whole pools lit blue from beneath as though the water dreamed of a sky it had been promised and never shown.

Through all of it moved the Golden Calderon Vizan and six of his finest undergraduates, each a small walking dawn in the one colour that was theirs and no one else’s alive - mint and deep blue and brown and lavender and yellow and orange - six warm lights strung loose around the black ponds at the base of the Sky Cliffs, the Professori himself drawing his gold quietly down into nothing, invisible in the warm bright dark and, for one more breath, wholly content.

This was supposed to be an easy hunt.

- from Chapter One of Our Lit