[Indigo]

They hadn't noticed anything was wrong at first. They lived their life mostly at night, when there was very little color visible anyway, and their pelt couldn't serve as a guide to the changes either. But gradually, over a few days—or was it weeks? They were not very good at time—it had become apparent that the color had vanished from the world.

This seemed to them like a problem that was beyond them to solve. In fact solving didn't really occur to them at all. It wasn't their kind of game. They merely rolled over and went back to sleep.

[Indigo]

Someone was calling them.

Not on a phone, although they had one of those—in the corner of their little volcanic crevice, where they hid in the middle of Nori, protected from overheating by the bubble of an eclipse spin around it like water—but something deeper, a cry that hooked them under the ribs and, if it were stronger, would attempt to drag them bodily out of their little hole. It didn't, of course. Their friend knew better than that. But they recognized it, and knew what it meant.

[Indigo]

They hauled themself out of their cave, then summoned up all their usual grace, and bounded up the mountain to the crater's rim. They were light on their feet—ha ha—and they rose high with each leap, high enough to see the landscape painted in flickering gray light, unsettling, wrong. Lava should not be the color of their fur. They viewed it with a kind of dispassionate discomfort, if such a thing could exist—they were bothered but not interested.

[Indigo]

At the top of the volcano they found their friend.

"Salazar," Lucius said, in his clipped radio voice, the voice of a man who was very disappointed in you, though really he had no reason to be disappointed in them and they knew it. He knew they knew it, too, but he persisted in using the voice on them anyway, mostly out of habit. "I was beginning to wonder if I would have to hike down to your cave and drag you out by hand."

"You do not have hands, Lucius."

"It's a figure of speech."

[Indigo]

"What is it that you want from me, old friend?" Salazar said. It had been some time since they'd last spoken to Lucius, who resented having to deal with nature except by proxy. Silly, silly man.

"You may have noticed...this corruption business."

"Corruption? Hmm. I have noticed some unusual occurrences. They don't have anything to do with me. And they don't speak to me of corruption, only of old and deep and forgotten magic." They considered. "I am that too, but not in the same way."

[Indigo]

"You...you haven't seen anything?" He spoke as if he thought they must be lying, or confused. Or lying and confused. Lucius did not always draw the same distinction between those things as Salazar would.

"Seen? No. There is nothing to see. Things simply look different than they did a few weeks ago. That has nothing to do with me."

"Then you won't help?"

"Help? How could I help? This is the world. I am not the world, I am just one thing. I can only control things that are of me."

[Indigo]

Lucius was hard for them to read. He was a bird, which was not of Salazar's realm, and while they had learned to read human expressions out of necessity long ago, that knowledge didn't help them with a person shaped like this. The flickering of his blue lights told them things sometimes, but now there was no blue for them to pick up on.

Still, they could sense his frustration. They said, "You came to me because you imagined I could fix this?"

[Indigo]

"I..." Lucius looked away. "You're the most powerful being I personally know. And I...there is some sort of corrupting force at work here, even if it's not one you can see. It makes sense, I suppose, since it gets into computers worse than anything else, but it's there, I promise you. I can't do anything about it without putting myself at risk. Even if I do put myself at risk I doubt I can do anything. I thought...I don't know what I thought."

[Indigo]

"I see," they said. "You are afraid."

"Yes," Lucius said. He sounded tired. Salazar did not wonder when he had last admitted this to anyone, because that was not their way, but it would have been a valid question, had they chosen to ask it. "I suppose you can't help me with that," he continued. "It's my problem. But I thought...that talking to you would make me feel better about all this. That it would seem more fixable."

[Indigo]

Salazar thought. They were not very good at people things, but Lucius was their friend, even if it had been an unconscionably long time since he'd visited even by their lax perception of time. They would try to help, if they could.

They said, "I have heard that people are sometimes comforted by the presence of a large furry friendly thing."

Lucius said, cautiously, "That's often true."

"Would you like to come back to my cave for a while, and sit with me? You can tell me what you have done since last we met."

Lucius was silent for a while. Then he said, "Yes. Thank you."

[Color Harvested]