Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2)

by T.J. Klune

Barely a cloud in the sky. The blue above matched the blue below. The tail end of summer, warm, but then he was always warm. The salt in the air tickled his nose, and he breathed it in until it filled his lungs.

Next to the house was an overgrown garden with flowers in golds and reds and pinks, overtaking the gazebo where, at the age of nine, a boy with fire in his blood had carved his initials into the brick to prove he existed: AFP. Arthur Franklin Parnassus.

A ghost, then, rose behind him, wrapping an arm around his throat, holding him captive. “You earned this,” it snarled in his ear. “You’ll learn your place, mark my words, boy. Say it. What are you? Say it.”

“I can’t answer that for you,” Arthur said. “All I can do is tell you that things will be different this time around. I will give the children what I never had: a place to be whoever they want to be, no matter what they can do or where they come from.”

“Nurture,” she said. “I know. A false dichotomy. The reality is that nature and nurture do not exist as separate entities. They exist in reciprocity.”

Into the sky, wings pumping, a trail of fire left in his wake. Muscles straining, he rose higher and higher, the stars melting, streaking across a black canvas, and he opened his beak to scream again, only to have white-hot fire pour from his mouth. Higher, higher, the horizon now curved, oxygen thin, causing him to gasp again and again. An apex, as far as he could climb, and he cried out once more as he was consumed. He detonated in a massive explosion that lit up the night sky as if the sun had arisen anew. The phoenix blasted apart, feathers and fire shooting off in every direction. He’d taken to the sky as a bird. He fell toward the ocean as a man.

Frank leapt from the water, moonlight catching his scales. And then he disappeared into the sea. Arthur began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, arms wrapped around his middle. The first tear was a surprise, the second a warning, and then the floodgates opened: he wept for the children—both known and unknown. He wept for each raised fist. He wept in bittersweet joy, in ferocious heartbreak. He wept at the unknowable mysteries of this universe. And for the first time, Arthur Franklin Parnassus wept for himself.

Lucy laughed. “Why be supreme when you could listen to the Supremes instead?” His shoulders and hips began to wiggle. “Stop! In the naaame of love. Be-fore you breeeaaak my heart! Think it oh-oh-ver.” He bowed.

Zoe chuckled. “A decree from one of your former kings relinquishing all rights to the lands of Marsyas to the sprites, signed in the year 1332? Yes, yes, it is. Not that we needed his legitimacy, but apparently you do. As such, when humans came and destroyed my people centuries later, they went against their own king’s ruling.

And the light that came from Linus was white and red and yellow and pink and blue and green and reddish-orange. He was theirs, they were his, and Arthur thought of the little yellow flower on the steps of the house when he’d first come back, the yellow of Linus’s sunflowers, his only piece of color in a monochrome world.