Two Blues: Za'id, Identity, and the Color of Being More Than One Thing
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There is a moment in Za'id's life — he is twelve years old, sitting under a tree outside the Druid village, three days after burying his parents — when a stranger arrives from the forest in incomprehensible clothes and asks him to do something no one else in that clearing can do: Write Arabic sounds in Gaelic letters.
Za'id does it without hesitation. Not because he is showing off. Not because he has been trained for it. He does it because it is simply what he is — a boy who has always lived in two languages, two traditions, two ways of understanding the world, and who has never thought to question it. He is Egyptian and he is Druid. He is both, completely, at the same time.
Who has heard of a Druid named Za'id?
He has. Right there. Under that tree.
The Making of Za'id
Za'id is Celtic and Egyptian by blood. His family carries both lineages, and he grew up holding them simultaneously — the old rites of the northern grove and the older traditions of the Nile, the Gaelic tongue and the Arabic of his Egyptian inheritance. When his parents die in a fire that also badly burns his sister Jumeela, he is taken in by the Druids. He receives a harp. He receives a stylus. He begins to draw.
At twelve he is already two things at once: a grieving boy and a student of an ancient order, an Egyptian by blood and a Druid in training. He does not experience these as contradictions. He experiences them as colors — two pigments that together make something neither one could be alone.
This is, in fact, exactly how he will one day describe it. He is a painter. That is how he sees the world.
Egyptian Blue and Woad
In the album concept built around Za'id, Pigment and Light, two pigments carry his identity. They are not chosen arbitrarily.
Egyptian blue is the oldest manufactured colour in human history — the first pigment ever synthesized by human hands, cooked from sand, copper oxide, and limestone at temperatures above 850°C, in Egypt around 2500 BCE. It did not exist in nature. It was made. And here is the detail that catches the breath: Egyptian blue still responds to infrared light today, glowing invisibly, findable by the right instrument thousands of years after it was mixed. The light in it was never extinguished. It simply became invisible to ordinary sight.
Woad is the opposite. It is not made — it is grown. Pressed from Isatis tinctoria, a plant native to the cold northern latitudes, it is the blue the Celtic and Norse peoples pressed from their own land, the blue that belongs to the ground rather than the furnace.
One blue Za'id was born carrying. One blue was made of him by the order that took him in. Neither is more real than the other. Neither is more his than the other. Together they make a colour that has no single name.
Why This Matters Today
Za'id is a fictional character set in the sixth century CE, on a fictional northern isle, inside a time-travel series. He is also, in the ways that count most, entirely contemporary. The experience of holding two identities simultaneously — of being, in Za'id's own words, always two things living in one skin — is not a historical curiosity. It is one of the most common human experiences on the planet, and one of the least well served by the stories we tell. We are better at narratives of either/or than both/and. We are better at characters who choose one heritage over another, resolve a conflict by picking a side, find peace by becoming singular.
Za'id never does that. He never has to. The question the world keeps trying to ask him — but which one are you, really? — is a question he does not find interesting, because the answer is obvious to him: he is both, and the both is the interesting part.
His bilingualism is the proof. When the stranger in the strange clothes needs Arabic phonics written in Gaelic letters, Za'id is the only person in the clearing who can do it — not despite being two things, but because he is. His diversity is not a complication to be resolved. It is a skill. It is, in the most literal sense, what makes him useful at the exact moment when usefulness is required.
The Painter's Eye
Za'id is also a painter, and this is not incidental to his identity — it is the expression of it.
Painting, particularly in the tradition he carries, is an act of translation. You take the world as it presents itself — light, colour, form, event — and you render it in a medium that is not the world itself. You find the pigment that approximates the blue of a sapphire stone waking in a grey hall. You grind it on papyrus and lay it down. You hold the thing that was, in the thing you have made, so that somewhere the moment is kept even after the moment is gone.
Za'id paints because he is, at his core, a keeper. Not of time, the way Eliyana is the Keeper of Time — but of the look of things, the color and light of specific moments. He is the visual memory of his world. And that capacity comes directly from the double inheritance he carries: the Egyptian artistic tradition, one of the most rigorous and ancient on earth, carried into a Celtic-Druid context that has its own relationship to image-making and symbol.
Two traditions of seeing, in one painter's eye.
The Harp and the Stylus
There is one more layer to Za'id that matters here: he is also a musician. He receives a harp at twelve — the instrument of the Druid tradition he is entering — and he takes to it naturally. Later, the man who gave him the stylus to mark with will turn out to have given him far more than a writing tool: the act of phonetically transcribing one language into another's alphabet is, in miniature, everything Za'id does. He takes two systems and finds the place where they can speak to each other.
That is what musicians do. That is what painters do. That is what people who carry two worlds in one body do, every day, without anyone naming it as remarkable — because to them, it simply is.
Za'id would be the first to say it is not always easy. The fire that took his parents is real. The grief in him is real. The years ahead — and there are hard ones coming, a flight to Egypt, reliance on relatives he barely knows, a reckoning with the Druid order that took him in and will eventually turn on him — will test every resource he has.
But the resource he has is double. Two blues. Two languages. Two ways of knowing what a moment looks like and how to hold it after it passes.
That is Za'id. That is why he matters.
And honestly — who has heard of a Druid named Za'id?
Right here. That's who.
Ellen E. Sutherland is the author of the Jamie Poole Diaries time-travel fiction series. Find the books at jamiepoolebooks.com. Za'id appears throughout the series as Eliyana's Advocate and the painter of the star map. If you have read this far, visit my Etsy store and use the code JAMIE10 to get a discount on The Time Travlers Tarot, the first time travel themed tarot in the World!
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