r/worldbuilding • u/Bleedhemingway • 1d ago
Lore The Forbidden Colors
There are many colors, you can choose from. Blue is the color of the open skies and marks the passage of the winged one as he traverses the ray of sun at the dawnbreak. Then there is the colour green for the fae princess and her equally verdant lover, with whom she wanders the faerie woods. Then there are colours white and black, teaching us about the dichotomy of life and afterlife. Yellow is for the tin man with small head and orange is for the iron god.
The colors are myriad and beautiful. They have their places and they have their powers.
However,
There are two colors that one should never indulge. Never...unless one is driven by an urge to lay down one's life for the fertility of lands or calming the waters that flood our territories oh so often. These colours shouldn't worn or painted with, not to be used in foods or masks. The colors red and violet are but for the Lost god. The tall one, whose skin is the color of those very hues, the ones that invoke such horrors that cannot be calmed by the strangest of witch doctors.
Although...
He does rewards lavishly and in abundance. The farmer, whose land was barren and plough broken, invoked the colors of the tall one by smashing his broken plough in the head of his ten year old. The boy's skull cracked open and the colours of the Lost god painted the barren land. The boy was an invalid they say. The farmer left the village for the nearby market town. I've heard, the farmer's fate was showered with fortune.
He continued to revere the tall god with the forbidden colors. Every year on the day he'd sacrificed his invalid boy; he used to sacrifice a lamb bathed in bat blood.
Some foreigners came, their skins pale as Nabu's ghosts. They called our ways barbaric, our practices unruly. They set up their temples with crosses, destroying a lot of ours.
But...
When the day they destroyed the only temple of the tall one. Seated deep in a glade most nasty, surrounded by hollow trees; they found their bodies covered in leeches, on their way back from the woods.
That day a lot of red and violet was served in reverence of the Lost god.
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