Violet never rose. It was already there, stretched thin across the sky like diluted bruise-light that refused to fade. The sun had not moved in years. It hung suspended behind a permanent amethyst haze, neither warming nor dimming, its edges blurred as if reality itself had softened under prolonged strain. There was no dawn. No night. Only degrees of cognitive pressure pressing inward from every direction.
Caelum woke before the hour he still privately called morning. He lay motionless on his low-cot, lean body outlined beneath a dark thermal sheet, eyes open to the matte ceiling above him. At twenty-two, he carried himself with the stillness of someone older — not weary, but contained. His hair, black and unevenly cut, brushed his brow in rough angles. A pale scar split his left eyebrow, a thin crescent earned in childhood before suppression training had hardened into law. His eyes were gray, though prolonged Violet had left the faintest amethyst undertone at their edges, as if the sky had stained him slowly over time.
He did not sit up immediately. He counted backward from two hundred, smoothing his thoughts into flat, harmless planes before allowing them to rise fully. Under endless Violet, a thought was not harmless by default. It required discipline.
When he reached one, he turned his head slightly and removed the Mind-Blanker from its hook.
The device was small — no wider than half a finger in diameter — a smooth circular button of matte alloy with a thin adhesive rim. It attached at the temple just above the ear, subtle enough to miss at a distance. When activated, a faint inner ring pulsed dim violet. Its purpose was simple and brutal: detect neural escalation before cognition crossed probability thresholds.
He pressed it into place.
It sealed with a soft click.
A low harmonic hum settled into his skull.
Relief followed — not silence, but narrowing. The world felt marginally less immediate.
If his thoughts began to condense — if emotional intensity rose too quickly — the device would emit a short, corrective beep. A warning. A leash tugged tight.
Outside, something howled.
He did not picture it.
He rose in one controlled motion, long frame unfolding without wasted movement, and pulled on his reinforced coat. The interior of the house reflected years of adaptation — padded corners, matte stone, no reflective surfaces, no glass, no artwork, nothing that might invite contemplation of form. Even metal fixtures had been sanded dull.
The streets beyond were narrow by design, discouraging distance and expansion. Buildings leaned inward, their windows replaced with diffused polymer panels. Murals had long ago been stripped away. Color encouraged imagination. Imagination encouraged structure. Structure encouraged matter.
At the intersection ahead, the air shimmered.
An Impulse Fracture flickered into partial existence — jagged luminescence forming ribs and limbs that never fully agreed on anatomy. It trembled between states, a panic given outline. Caelum lowered his gaze immediately. Eye contact invited narrative. Narrative invited reinforcement. He emptied his thoughts into numbers — load ratios, inventory counts, measured angles of structural decay. The Fracture twitched toward him, starved of emotional cohesion, then collapsed inward with a brittle hiss and dissolved.
His Mind-Blanker gave a soft, single beep.
A warning.
He steadied his breathing until the hum returned to baseline.
The house door opened with a manual latch; electronics often misbehaved under long-term saturation. Inside, the air felt quieter, as though the walls themselves absorbed stray cognition. His father sat at the narrow table near the interior wall.
Age had carved him thin. Once broad, he had narrowed into tendon and bone beneath gray fabric that hung loosely on his frame. His silver hair was cropped short, practical and severe, exposing the deep lines at his temples. A Mind-Blanker — same circular design, worn and scratched — rested against his own right temple, its rim slightly discolored from years of continuous wear. The violet saturation scars beneath his eyes were faint but undeniable. Endless suppression had etched itself into him.
"You were late," the old man said without looking up.
"Three minutes."
"Three minutes is enough."
Caelum placed two salvaged stabilizer cells on the table. His movements were precise, economical. Emotion wasted energy. Emotion risked shape.
A scraping sound traveled along the exterior wall.
Both men went still.
The scrape softened into a whisper.
Then into something resembling a child's laugh.
Caelum's pulse rose before he could restrain it. The Mind-Blanker emitted a quiet, disapproving beep.
His father's voice lowered but did not shake. "Do not engage it emotionally."
"I won't."
The whisper slid along stone like fingers searching mortar seams. For a single, dangerous heartbeat, it resembled Lyra's voice — bright, teasing, impatient with silence. Memory surged upward with color and detail.
Caelum crushed it immediately.
The whisper warped into a brittle shriek and dissolved.
His father exhaled slowly, exhaustion visible in the slump of his shoulders. "Memory is invitation," he murmured.
Caelum rose without speaking and crossed to the small heating unit built into the counter. The routine steadied him. He measured dried root shavings and compressed protein grain into a shallow metal pot, added water from a sealed container, and lit the low flame. Steam rose in faint spirals. He stirred slowly, deliberately, focusing on the rhythm of the spoon against metal. The scent was plain — salt, starch, something faintly bitter. Food was maintenance, not comfort.
He ladled the thin soup into two bowls and carried one back to the table. His father accepted it with both hands, though the tremor in his fingers caused the liquid to ripple dangerously close to the rim. Caelum watched the movement, ready to intervene — not from fear of a spill, but from fear of what a sudden startle might produce.
They ate in silence.
Outside, the city quieted further as Silence Hours approached. Doors sealed. Speech lowered. Somewhere distant, a muted crash suggested someone had failed containment. The pressure in the air thickened subtly, Violet pressing closer during collective withdrawal.
His father's breathing grew shallow.
"Come here," the old man said.
Caelum knelt beside him.
Up close, he could see how thin the skin had grown along his father's jaw, how deeply the violet shadows pooled beneath his eyes. The Mind-Blanker at his temple flickered faintly, struggling to regulate decades of suppression.
His father pressed two objects into his hands: an older Mind-Blanker, cracked along its rim, and a sealed leather journal.
"You'll need both."
"I already have one."
"You'll need both."
Another distant shattering rippled through the district.
"Imagination killed your mother," his father said, voice steady but faint. "She believed she could shape it without cost. She relived what she should have released."
Caelum wanted to answer. Wanted to say her name. Wanted to ask what she had imagined in her final moment.
He did not.
To ask was to invite detail. To invite detail was to risk reconstruction.
"You will not make that mistake," his father continued. "Do not let them teach you to imagine freely."
Them.
The Mind-Blanker at Caelum's temple skipped.
A soft beep.
Then another — closer together.
A thought slipped through before he could flatten it.
What if I let myself remember him as he was?
Behind him, light refracted across the matte wall.
Wings unfolded — vast, crystalline, precise. A Glass-Winged shape assembled from intersecting planes of bent amethyst light, immense and silent. It did not roar. It observed.
His father saw it.
For the first time, terror broke through his composure — not at the creature, but at Caelum.
"Stop," he whispered.
Caelum inhaled sharply and collapsed the thought inward. He did not attack the image; he erased the impulse that birthed it. The wings fractured into splinters of light and dissolved.
On the floor lay a single crystal shard.
Real.
His father stared at it. Then at his son.
"You're not safe," he breathed.
His chest rose once more.
Then stilled.
No surge. No dramatic collapse. Just the quiet failure of a mind that had clenched too long.
Caelum remained kneeling.
He wanted to remember his father younger — broad-shouldered, stern but steady, hands firm on his when teaching him how to empty a thought. He wanted to hear his voice without the tremor. He wanted to hold the memory before it thinned.
But he did not dare replay it.
If he relived it too vividly, it might take form.
If he suppressed it too completely, it would fade.
He realized with a cold, spreading clarity that soon his father would no longer exist anywhere but inside him — and even there, he would have to ration him carefully. One recalled image at a time. Never too much. Never too detailed.
Grief, in this world, had to be diluted.
The Mind-Blanker hummed steadily.
He removed his father's device and set it on the table.
The shard on the floor caught the violet haze and refracted it into quiet, impossible color.
It was beautiful.
That frightened him more than the creature had.
Outside, a deeper howl rolled through the district — something larger manifesting somewhere beyond sight.
He fastened the cracked Mind-Blanker beside his own.
Double suppression.
The hum deepened, narrowing his inner world further.
"I will not imagine," he whispered.
Behind him, where vast wings had nearly taken full shape, the air shimmered faintly — not gone, merely waiting.
Violet did not recede.
It never did.
And Caelum understood that one day, even his father would become too dangerous to remember.