Speculative Fiction Concept: Vamboge

Vamboge is a lost color, a hue that could once exist, but now cannot. It has been called the second yellow, the shadow of black, and a form of greenish-red, but all who have seen it agree those descriptions are all equally not quite true, though not quite wrong.

The ancient First Flower was of bright vamboge, as was the first meat that evolved, was killed, and turned to rot. The First Cogitators saw vamboge in the Fifth Cardinal Direction 64 million years ago, and could make pigments to match it with crushed aglaophotis, and powdered olieribos.

For the First Cognitators, vamboge was their Inviolate Pigment. They’d have called it holy, or profane, had they any concept of mere divinity, good, or evil. Their greatest sins and most horrific knowledge they scribed in vamboge and thin slices of their own mummified brains.

Had the First Cogitators survived, vamboge would have survived, and no crude ancestor to humans would ever have walked on two feet. But as they sought to imprint vamboge on everything, that oldest terrestrial society pulled at the fabric of spacetime too hard.

When the load of vamboge in a universe barely able to contain it grew too great for causality to contain, it slipped. Like an overfull ship sitting low in the water, pulled hard to one side, and then the ropes snap to have to roll so far back, it founders, and sinks.

As their entire existence unraveled, the First Cognitators themselves could not say if their blighted culture’s fall erased vamboge, or if vamboge’s erasure drove their culture to cannibalize itself. Each of the alien minds sought to preserve a private mote of inviolate hue.

Their behavior could be called madness, but it was not some random gibbering state of chaos. The First Cognitators desired vamboge above all, the same possessive need as drives addicts, tyrants, and poets. To sustain one more moment with the tint was worth losing all else.

So the impossible cities fell — remembered only by names their creators never used: Haurthul, Iringol, and Karak-Ynaros. No terrestrial material can reflect the unlight of vamboge, nor any mortal eye see it. And in a just universe, that would be the end of it.

But the universe is neither just, nor unjust. It simply is as it is, and though humans cannot see or create the Inviolate Hue, under just the wrong circumstance, they can experience it. Many names exist for mortals who have tasted vamboge, but the most accurate is just “the Damned.”

Most commonly the taste of vamboge comes from an altered state, some transcendent pleasure or pain, love or hate, awareness or dullity, combined with pressure upon the brain. Some few tainted drugs may break the final gap, or a flickering moment of temporary death.

A tiny fraction of humans who hear vamboge’s frequency remain free of it. Haunted, perhaps, or damaged beyond obsession, but free. But most do not. Once the Inviolate Hue enters their senses, they will do anything to experience it again, just as the First Cogitators did

Once a human craves to know such an impossible secret, other hints can be found. Forbidden books, the rantings of the vamboge-tainted from other eras, the echo of impossible colors within the search for a unified field theory, or the lost name of god may all give a clue.

The wealthy infected with vamboge are often seen as eccentric or visionaries. Any others are quickly labeled crackpots, madmen, idiots, addicts, and cultists. Some such labels are unfair. Most aren’t. Many destroyed themselves before they can harm the world. Other’s don’t.

Vamboge is neither the least common, nor the most dangerous secret of the First Cogitators, and seeking their relics to find that Inviolate Hue often unleashes hungrier mind viruses and bloodier sciences. Nor are the First Cognitators the only secrets best forgotten.

Secret societies have formed, vast research facilities built, and every possibly kindness and cruelty has been unleashed over thousands of years for vamboge, and brighter and darker horrors have been sought, found, and even built. All for a color that cannot exist.

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