The city of Aethelburg suffered from a city-wide case of quiet quitting on a metaphysical scale. Its citizens moved with the gentle, unprotesting slowness of river weeds. They mended shoes, stacked bread on cooling racks, and sorted municipal records, but their eyes held the placid vacancy of deep sleep. A shimmering, opalescent haze hung in the air, a visible manifestation of the Mandate, woven by the silent, colossal figures who perched on the city’s highest spires: the Weavers.
Elara polished the brass bells in the clockless tower. The bells no longer chimed; they hummed, a single, soporific tone that vibrated through the cobblestones. For most, this hum was a lullaby. For Elara, it was a grinding stone against her nerves. She felt an itch behind her own eyes, a desperate craving for a sharp edge, a loud noise, a splash of stark, undiluted color in a world of watercolour greys.
Her own small rebellion was to remember. She hoarded memories of bright things: the cerise of a sunset from a storybook she’d found with its pages half-fused together, the impossible emerald of a beetle’s wing she’d glimpsed before it scuttled into a crack, the sharp, metallic tang of her own blood when she bit her lip to feel something real.
One afternoon, while tracing the grime from a bell’s inscription, she saw him across the square. He was delivering tallow candles, but he moved with a subtle syncopation, a slight hitch in his step that broke the universal rhythm of the city’s slumber. He caught her eye and, for a breathtaking second, his face broke into a grin. A real one. Quick, clever, and utterly illegal in its vibrancy. Then he looked away, his movements once again sinking into the accepted lethargy. But the image was seared into Elara’s mind. It was the spark that ignited the kernel of main character energy she hadn’t known she possessed.
She began taking different routes home, her heart thrumming with a nervous energy that felt like a foreign substance. She finally found him near the dyeworks, where the runoff canals ran a uniform, sludgy brown. He was leaning against a wall, pretending to be entranced by the slow swirl of the water.
“You’re awake,” she whispered, the words feeling loud and clumsy.
He didn’t startle. “Mostly. It comes and goes. The name’s Kael.” He had an easy confidence that seemed to push back against the hazy air around him. What the old texts might have called charisma, Kael called ‘rizz,’ a word from some pre-Mandate dialect he’d found. It was a kind of inner light that the Weavers’ tapestry couldn’t entirely smother.
Their meetings became her new reality. They would find forgotten corners of Aethelburg—a disused cistern, the hollow shell of a gasometer—and talk. Kael explained how the magistrates insisted the Somnolence was a blessing, a gift of peace that had ended the Age of Anxiety. They preached that sharp emotions were a sickness, that ambition was a fever. It was a masterclass in civic gaslighting, and it had worked for generations.
“My grandmother remembered,” Kael told her, his voice low. “She called it the Great Fade. Said the Weavers promised tranquility but delivered a living death.”
Together, they started their own quiet resistance. This was the soft launch of their rebellion. They’d practice focusing, holding onto a single, sharp thought for as long as they could. They’d read forbidden fragments, poems that spoke of rage and wild laughter. But there was a cost. Kael called it emotional inflation; the more joy you sought, the higher the price in sorrow when the Mandate’s haze inevitably seeped back in. Some days, the effort left them so drained they could barely stand.
A small circle grew around them. A baker who remembered the crisp, explosive sound of a perfect crust. A librarian who had found an atlas and wept for the idea of distant, different places. A musician who could recall a tune with more than one note. They were a tiny island of consciousness in an ocean of sleep. They learned that the perpetual, vague anxiety of the drowsy citizens was a form of mental doomscrolling, a state encouraged by the Weavers, who seemed to feed on the low-grade despair.
Their plan was desperate. They couldn’t destroy the Weavers, but the librarian had found a diagram of the celestial loom. There were anchor threads, ley-lines of psychic energy that tethered the haze to the city. Severing one wouldn’t wake everyone, but it might create a pocket of reality. A sanctuary.
Elara and Kael were chosen to make the attempt. The anchor thread they targeted was in the old oracle’s observatory at the city’s peak, directly beneath the perch of a Weaver. To get there, they had to climb the Spire of Whispers, where the Mandate was thickest, turning the air into a syrup of disjointed memories and phantom feelings.
As they ascended, the air grew heavy with a dream-logic. Kael faltered, his face going slack. He murmured about a lost dog from his childhood, his hand reaching for a phantom leash. The Mandate had found his deepest, softest spot of personal grief. He was trapped.
“Kael!” Elara cried, but her voice was swallowed by the humming. Panic, cold and sharp, pierced her own drowsiness. She could let it take her, sink into the grey comfort of giving up. But then she saw his face, the grin he’d given her in the square, and a new feeling, hot and ferocious, burned through her. It was rage. She was entering her warrior era, and the Weavers would not have him.
Clutching a shard of obsidian they’d brought—a sliver of true, physical darkness—she pushed on alone. The Weaver above was a formless knot of shadow and light, its psychic pressure a physical weight. She ignored the siren-call of her own pleasant memories, sidestepped the grasping hands of her deepest fears. She wouldn’t be like the others, doomscrolling through the frayed edges of their own consciousness until they faded completely.
She saw the thread. It wasn’t physical, but a shimmering line of pure obedience, vibrating with the collective sigh of the city. With a scream that was pure, jagged sound, a noise Aethelburg hadn’t heard in a century, Elara sliced the obsidian through the line.
The hum in her bones didn’t stop, but it changed. A higher frequency wove into it, a note of clarity. Below, in the district tethered to the severed thread, a thousand heads lifted. A collective gasp went up. A woman dropped her basket, staring at the sudden, shocking red of an apple. A man looked at his own hands as if he’d never seen them before. The colours of the world rushed in, painful and glorious.
Kael blinked, shaking his head as the phantom dog faded. He looked at Elara, truly looked at her, and his smile returned, tired but real.
They stood on the spire, watching the small patch of the city stir as if from a spell. It wasn’t a victory, not yet. It was a beginning. A single, vibrant patch on a quilt of grey. The Weavers were still there, and they would surely notice the tear in their work. But for the first time, in a long time, the people in that one district were awake enough to be afraid. And awake enough to hope.
Leave a Reply