Blue Horizon: hibiscus.

02/18/2025 update: A work-in-progress text-based game. Will note every update. Eventually, I'll make this into a small visual novel, though it won't happen particularly soon.

This [currently] short story (and eventual text-based game) spoils: family relationships, a part of the mechanics of how their "soul energy" works, a small amount of backstory. Unlike previous public supplementary Blue Horizon material, it has more of a touch of its serious side to it.

Warning: Discussion of filicide and implied genocide.

hibiscus.

Blue Horizon: hibiscus.

by Naila Moonsi.

The Red brother. Antonio Chandrani-Rivera. The one who must cultivate a world for himself.

The Golden brother. Fernando Chandrani-Rivera. The one who must not fear his soul that matches others’.

The Silver brother. Rajab Chandrani-Rivera. Sheer perfection.

Triplet brothers! Their atheist father, Ranvir Chandrani, he would never call them anything like ‘little devas.’ A comforting atmosphere. Always, always.

Always, always.

Always.

Always…

☾ ☾ ☾

In Raj Rivera’s dorm room, the memory of being siblings stung like the sight of a bee in Papá’s gardens. His Silver brother with his whispering visions of the future did not refuse Antonio Chandrani-Rivera’s visits. He rarely did. Antonio’s Red sung with nightmares—with that long-lasting depression between them. That feeling was raw and too near him, too near Raj; it was that thing teenagers abhorred, ran from.

And yet Raj had let Antonio trespass again. His room was too cleaned up for who he was. Raj rarely put away his clothes properly in his drawers and closets. Antonio wondered if Raj’s crush had visited earlier in the day.

It was light enough a thought. The rest of the week and month came back to Antonio; it broke that lighthearted happiness. This was part of why they tended to avoid each other, he and his fraternal twin brother.

The room’s appearance was too lacking in colors outside white and black. Raj was always like this now. His dark visage was considered too beautiful by so many around Antonio—even his closest friends—Raj’s moon-silver hair, it always fell like a dream around him. That appearance…

It was too sharp and unchanging. It’d been for some time. White suits, the smallest splash of color in his shirt, his ties…

Antonio missed the colors that littered Raj’s childhood room within the beachside Chandrani complex, within Baba’s household… All those over-colorful gaming set-ups, the endless construction toy building bricks that still hurt Antonio’s feet to remember, the cutest artwork Raj drew himself, the thousand colored pencils and million markers. He wondered if Raj would ever let more colors back into his life again.

Antonio understood hypocrisy. He knew how his twins and cousins saw his wearing the Chandrani uniform—that now over-familiar indigo blue fit with its soft silver fall of moons and stars toward a rush of waves—way too constantly. He was one-tracked, while they varied their clothes and styles to show a sense of self, a sense of personality beyond the family name.

While Raj… Raj wanted something. Something far beyond ‘personality.’ It was something gnawing between them. It was like a fairytale. It was like something too real. It was all these eerie, tricky, just-about-teenaged things.

The ocean they’d grown up knowing together was not near enough. Precarious lands stretched, everywhere, in Antonio’s world.

“It’s just…” The words crumbled to ash in Antonio’s mouth without even blooming. A veritable fire across his mind, his inner and outer loci; a flower that would never bloom, stuck in that place and time.

He tried, “It’s just, Armando Rivera… Papá, he was discussing how the hibiscus flower, it was difficult for him to face and see as beautiful last fucking month! He always brings this up, Raj, when the pundits ask about his gardening hobby. He doesn’t even grow it at his place? It was the flower he got obsessed with cultivating when his brother died… He tried again when their father found them again. When his eldest siblings all died! He said this last month, right on an actual news channel…”

Raj Rivera’s Silver stayed stable and still on him. It was the way it often was. His twin finally said, “What does that have to do with my life and desires, Tono? The red hibiscus is my favorite flower. I decided on it some time ago. So what?”

Antonio stared with his Red. It did not get a proper reading. When Raj was furious with him… Raj was furious. Antonio couldn’t comprehend who it was toward.

Antonio said, “Everyone’s talking. It’s been all over the astra for days. They’re saying you’re trying to make a scene.”

Raj turned back toward Antonio. He met that Red.

“What do you think I am doing, bhaiya?”

Antonio stared. That Silver, it was becoming low-lit. The sense of the prettiest of starry black night hid beneath it.

“You’re…” he sighed. “You’re trying to establish your favorite flower.”

Raj didn’t seem happier with him. His smile wasn’t particularly that pretty perfect Chandrani smile, that banal thing, that well-crafted thing. It was stretched a bit ugly. Raj Rivera did not hide his feelings from his twin brother Antonio Chandrani-Rivera. It was the littlest part of their sharded reality together Antonio held within him with pride.

Raj murmured, “I’m no longer your crybaby little brother. That’s becoming noticeable. Do you think this visage I’ve worked hard to craft, it’s something easy, Tono? You, Fernando, Armando Rivera, Layla, Priya, all of those people at home… They’re always so determined. They always want to say, ‘Oh, you’re the handsomest man,’ and be so solid about how they believe in it. Do you think everyone in the world believes in that for me?”

“I… Does this have to do with the hibiscus?” Antonio became restless. “Papá, he’ll love you no matter what, Raj. We’re lucky in that way—”

Raj said, “We’re lucky young men. It’s true. I tried warning you that Armando Rivera would try to pull his own core out with that man’s hand; I saw the spill of light from his chest with my Silver eyes, and yet you did not believe me. You became enraged, that way you got at eight and nine years old after all our sorrows crashed down on us. You ran right in.”

“Is that the reason the hibiscus is your favorite flower?”

“What do you believe?”

[click to go back up.]