Prompt #3: Rainbow. Something has unexpectedly changed color. What and why?
All have seen the grey of the clouds. It is a temporary paling of the sky; a covering that soon parts, revealing bright blue and burning gold, or dark velvet and shining white. The grey clouds are insubstantial mist.
Yet they share their color with me. I am grey and unyielding.
When the world was sung into being, when the gold and white lights appeared in the sky, I saw them. And when the laws that governed the world were made known, one of them was carved into my square face, carved deep, to be as unchangeable and unyielding as my stone.
I was made to last; I learned the law that all who betrayed the Emperor and His own would pay with their bright red blood.
The blood would be shed by the very side the traitors had chosen.
So was the law; so it was written. So I bore testimony. And time and again the law was fulfilled, for the Emperor's word is true, and what is true will also come true. Though there were times it was long in the coming.
There was a time when traitors abounded, a hundred years when they ate each other and ate what was good, and still the law waited. Still the law was true; they shed each other's blood, and the white winter warmed with spots of red.
Then came the spring. The explosion of colors, and the coming of the brightest gold.
Then came news of another traitor. This one was meant to be a King. But he betrayed his country, his people, his family, and his crown—for the sake of a crown of chains.
And the side he had chosen came and demanded his life; the worst of them pointed to me and used my testimony as proof of her claim.
She spoke the law, and it was true.
And so—it should have been done—that his bright blood spilled over my stone, and the law be fulfilled once more.
But no.
Not this time.
No, for the traitor was loved, and had come back to the camp of the Lion, and therefore the Lion—the brightest gold, the source of color, the perfect keeper of all laws—He let Himself be laid on my engraved surface instead. Then another unyielding stone, crafted by the hands of traitors to slay other traitors, plunged down into the Lion's side.
And His bright blood filled the letters in my grey stone.
His golden fur lay drenched on my grey surface.
There, in the place where traitors were killed, the Law-maker laid His life down. And His blood changed the color of my stone, stained it, filled it, and the next morning, when He rose, gold and living once more, I yielded. I cracked. My middle fell to the ground, my testimony changed.
For the law had been fulfilled.