That night, color rippled across the sky like the slow-moving waves of an unfathomably immense prehistoric sea. It was dark at first—nearly black, like a heavy velvet curtain, and starless—and we all sat together in silence, as if we were respecting the mourning garb of the heavens. All of us, that is, except Erza. She had gone up on the cliff by herself, and we let her be. We watched as the sky changed slowly, into an iron gray. The wind must have been cold up on the cliff, but Erza wouldn't have noticed it that night. She sat there alone, without her armor, and we waited for dawn to come. The sky turned a faint brown veined with orange—almost as if it were rusting with the tears it had stored up, the tears it could not cry—the tears Erza shed.
The next wave of time turned everything scarlet. We all watched, breathless, as the blood-red color drenched everything, fierce, passionate, vibrant, and full of life. It even seemed to drip off the rocks of the cliff where Erza sat, her face buried in her arms, until no one could tell where the sky ended and Erza's beautiful scarlet hair began.
The sky was her's that night. It painted itself in harmony with her heart; mourning, cold, tear-stained—and broken inside her, but still beating. Perhaps the sky had heard the whisper of Titania and danced in her footsteps...or perhaps it was the whisperings of someone else reaching out to her...the touch of that last color that twisted the knife so deeply in her gut.
At last, the tower of heaven washed itself a bright, vivid blue. If only she had looked up.