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Yellow and Blue within The Scarab Cycle: Mourning, Struggle, and the Spirit of Ukraine

  • Writer: john raymond
    john raymond
  • Jun 25
  • 3 min read
Link to a free digital copy below
Link to a free digital copy below

When I first began writing The Scarab Cycle, the symbolism wasn’t deliberate—not at first. I had used other colors before, of course. But it was the use of Yellow and Blue together that began to speak back to me as I wrote.

What started as a stylistic flourish slowly transformed into a spiritual constant—a palette of pain, resistance, and something approaching hope. It wasn’t until much later, in the midst of watching the Ukrainian people resist annihilation, that I understood what I had done.


In The Scarab Cycle, Yellow and Blue are not heroic colors in the traditional sense. They are not emblems of kingship or conquest. They are the colors of mourning. They drape those who remember of the dead. They decorate those who have lost something irreplaceable. They are worn not in triumph, but in sorrow—and in the stubborn refusal to be unmade by that sorrow.


So as the story deepened, so did the meaning. Yellow and Blue came to signify not only loss, but defiance. Not only death, but opposition to its meaninglessness. These were not passive symbols. They were active declarations: that wrongful harm must be named. That injustice must be marked. That harm done with malice is the cruelest kind of evil—and must be resisted, no matter the cost.


And then came Ukraine.


When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and then escalated, it wasn’t just an act of war—it was an assault on meaning. Entire towns turned to ash. Families disappeared. History was erased in real time. It wasn’t conquest. It was extermination. It was, in essence, the same thing The Scarab Cycle has always been about: the machinery of violence grinding the innocent into dust—and the desperate struggle of individuals, broken or not, to stand up inside that storm.


In that light, the Ukrainian flag—blue over yellow—has also become something more than a national symbol. It has become the banner of those who refuse to surrender to destructive evils.


And in an eerie, poetic way, it was already there in my fiction. In the world of the Scarab, those colors are worn by characters who struggle or defy death, who bear the weight of the fallen, and who scream into the face of entropy, “I am still here. I still see what was done.”


That is what the people of Ukraine have done, too.


I do not claim that I foresaw any of this. Art often speaks through us before we understand what we are saying. But I do now see how The Scarab Cycle participates in a larger struggle—not only against war and cruelty, but against the deeper spiritual rot of indifference.


Yellow and Blue are the colors of conflict and resistance, yes. But also the colors of memory. They remind us that what was done cannot be undone, but neither can it be allowed to vanish without meaning.


So if you read the books and notice those colors in the margins—in clothing, in banners, in rituals of grief and survival—know this: they are not accidents. They are signals. Markers. They are there to say: some terrible struggle happened here—and someone still remembers.


And in that remembrance, we still resist.



Read Book One of The Scarab Cycle, The Lightshy Crow, for free here:




 
 
 

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