The city was perpetually bathed in a soft, uniform grey. Not the gentle grey of a misty morning, but the flat, lifeless grey of a forgotten file. Elara worked as a Tinter, a job that was once an art and was now a science of managed moods. Her station overlooked the plaza where citizens shuffled in coats of prescribed ochre and teal, their faces placid. Her own mood was supposed to be one of quiet diligence, a hue the Consortium called “Productivity Pearl.” Mostly, she just felt tired.
It was a city-wide burnout, a collective quiet quitting of the soul. No one spoke of it, but you could see it in the slump of their shoulders, in the way they no longer looked up at the sky. There was nothing to see, after all.
The Consortium had made it so. Decades ago, in a grand act of atmospheric engineering they called the Great Sustenance, they had begun their work. For stability, they’d said. To end the chaotic whims of weather and the gnawing eco-anxiety of a dying planet. They Harvested. Stripping the firmament of its volatile blues, its passionate sunsets, its angry storm-purples. They bottled it, processed it, and sold it back to the populace as emotional tinctures and aesthetic palettes. Your home could have the “vibe” of a summer evening, but you could never feel one.
Elara’s side hustle was a quiet rebellion. In her tiny apartment, she crushed beetles for a sliver of carmine, boiled onion skins for a hint of gold, steeped rust in vinegar for a shade of raw earth. These were authentic colours, illegal and unstable. She sold them to the few who still craved a flicker of the real, a reminder that feelings weren’t meant to be prescribed.
One evening, an old man named Corvus found her stall in the under-market. His face was a roadmap of un-tinted emotions. He didn’t want to buy. He wanted to trade. He pressed a small, heavy locket into her hand. It was tarnished brass, etched with a spiral.
“It holds a memory,” he rasped, his voice like dry leaves. “From before. Before they tidied up God’s canvas.”
Back in her room, under the sterile glow of a Consortium-issued light strip, Elara worked the clasp. It sprung open. Inside, there was no picture, no lock of hair. There was only a tiny, shimmering pane of what looked like glass. But a colour radiated from it that she had only ever read about in forbidden books. It was a deep, aching blue. Cerulean. It didn’t just have a look; it had a feeling. It felt like a deep breath, like a cool drink, like falling upward. It was a colour with main character energy, a colour that drowned out the Productivity Pearl and filled her with a terrifying, exhilarating wildness.
She found Corvus again. He explained that a few of the old sky-watchers had created the lockets, capturing slivers of the true sky just before the final harvest. Theirs was a parasocial relationship with a sky that no longer existed. They were keepers of a ghost.
“The numbness is getting worse,” Corvus said, gesturing to the grey expanse above. “People are forgetting how to feel anything without a tincture. They drift in a grey fugue, a kind of waking goblin mode with none of the chaotic joy. They just… are. We need a reminder.”
Elara looked at her hands, stained with the faint, honest colours of her illegal trade. She thought of the perfect, soul-crushing hues she mixed every day. Contentment Beige. Aspiration Gold. Amicable Moss. They were lies. The cerulean in the locket was a truth so potent it felt like a weapon.
She knew what she had to do. It was not a grand plan. It was a Tinter’s plan. For a week, she worked, using every scrap of her illicit knowledge. She didn’t try to replicate the blue. That was impossible. Instead, she tried to distill its essence. She ground the locket’s pane into a fine, shimmering dust, mixing it not with pigment, but with vaporised carrier oils and atomised saline—the base for the city’s atmospheric humidity. She created a whisper of a memory, an aerosol of authenticity.
On the night of the Concordance, a city-wide celebration of the Consortium’s benevolent rule, Elara ascended to the highest spire of the Tinter’s Guild. Below, the plaza was a sea of placid faces. From a maintenance grate, she released her creation into the city’s ventilation system.
It was not a colour. It was the idea of a colour. A phantom scent of rain on dust. A sudden, inexplicable coolness on the skin. A ghost on the tongue.
Down below, a woman in a coat of Amicable Moss stopped mid-stride. A man arguing with a vendor fell silent. A child, who had never known anything but the grey ceiling of the world, looked up. All across the plaza, people stopped. They raised their faces to the blank, empty sky, and for the first time in a generation, they felt an ache. A deep, profound, and beautiful ache for something they did not know they had lost. They could not see the blue, but they could feel its absence. And in that shared, sudden grief, a sliver of the real world, sharp and wonderful and terrible, returned.
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