Chapter 1: The Monochrome Corpse

Chapter 1: The Monochrome Corpse

The rain in Aethelburg didn’t just fall; it performed. Each drop sizzled as it hit the acid-bright holograms advertising dreams you couldn’t afford, refracting the neon glow into a billion fleeting promises. The air, thick with the scent of ozone and ambition, tasted of regret. It was the kind of city that would sell you the rope to hang yourself with, then charge your ghost for the view.

And I, Jack Vektor, was its forgotten janitor.

The summons came as they always did: a chime on my issued slate that felt less like a request and more like a leash being tugged. The Arcanum Bureau of Investigation—the ABI—didn't call on their "Consultant" for anything clean. They called me when reality had sprung a leak and they didn't want to get their polished boots wet.

My desire was simple: to be left alone in my trench coat and my grief, another ghost haunting the perpetual twilight of this city. The obstacle, as always, was the past. And the past had just sent me an address.

Elysian Bites. The kind of restaurant where the appetizers cost more than my monthly rent and the clientele could rewrite their own history by popular demand. I pushed through doors that shimmered like heat haze, stepping from the gritty street into a world of polished chrome and hushed reverence. The air inside hummed with latent power, the subtle thrum of concentrated belief that kept the city's impossible physics from collapsing.

Two uniformed ABI officers, Flint and Shimmer, stood guard by a private booth. Flint, a man whose jaw seemed permanently clenched against the absurdity of his job, blocked my way. "Vektor. The brass insisted." His tone made it clear he'd rather consult a divining rod.

"I'm touched," I said, my voice flat. "What's the mess this time? Another socialite's sponsored familiar throw up a temporal paradox?"

Shimmer, whose features were a little too perfect, a little too symmetrical to be entirely natural, gave a nervous laugh. "Nothing so... mundane, Consultant."

My gaze slid past them to the booth. That’s when the first alarm bell went off in my head—not a sound, but a pressure, a sickness. It was the feeling of a discordant note in the symphony of reality, a detail so profoundly wrong it made my teeth ache.

My Lítost, the curse my trauma had branded onto my soul, flared behind my eyes. It wasn't a gift. It was an open wound that let me perceive the narrative threads of the world, the emotional static that clung to people and places. Right now, it was screaming.

"Let me see," I commanded, my tone shedding its weariness for a cold edge of authority I rarely used anymore. Flint hesitated, then reluctantly stepped aside.

And I saw it. The obstacle wasn't a paradox; it was an impossibility.

Slumped over the table, amidst shattered crystal and a puddle of spilled, iridescent wine, was the corpse. It was a man, or the caricature of one. He wore a pinstripe suit, a dapper fedora, and spats. But he was utterly, defiantly black and white. Not pale, not drained of color, but rendered in grayscale, as if a panel from a 1930s newspaper comic had been cut out and pasted into the three-dimensional world. His lines were bold, his shading was simple cross-hatching, and a pair of white, cartoon-gloved hands lay limp on the table. In the center of his chest was a perfectly circular hole, from which no blood flowed. Instead, the edges of the hole seemed to fray, like burnt celluloid.

"Gods above," Shimmer whispered, looking away. "What is it?"

That was the wrong question. My Lítost showed me the right one. It wasn't what is it, but what was it?

I took a step closer, my action instinctive. The air around the body was a void. Normally, even a stranger radiated a cloud of personal history, of connections, of story. This... this had nothing. It was a vacuum in the narrative. An erasure.

"No one remembers him," I stated, my eyes scanning the terrified faces of the restaurant staff huddled by the bar. "You brought him in, you sat him down, but when you try to recall his face, his name... it's just static, isn't it?"

Flint nodded grimly. "Slips away. Like trying to hold smoke. We checked the reservation systems. The security feeds. There's a gap. An hour-long gap where he just... doesn't exist. But here he is."

My Lítost throbbed, a migraine behind reality. I let it wash over me, bracing against the tide of my own ghosts that always rose with it. The world swam. Colors bled. The low hum of the restaurant became a cacophony of emotional residue: the chef's pride, a waiter's jealousy, a patron's secret affair. And then, beneath it all, the cold, silent scream of a story being unwritten.

This was a murder of a different kind. You don't just kill a person in Aethelburg; if you have enough power, enough belief behind you, you can kill their very concept. You can make it so they never were.

And my sight, my curse, was the only thing in the city that could still see the ghost of the story.

"The hole," I said, pointing. "It's not a wound. It's a deletion. Something... or someone... reached into his narrative and pressed backspace."

I knelt, ignoring the metaphysical chill radiating from the monochrome corpse. I needed a detail, an anchor, something the killer hadn't managed to erase. My fingers hovered over his pocket. A thread. Not a physical one, but a sliver of narrative energy, faint but persistent. It was a thread of belief, of connection. It led away from the body, straight towards the most exclusive booth in the restaurant, now empty.

"Who was sitting over there?" I asked, looking up at Flint.

Flint's face went from grim to pale. Shimmer suddenly looked fascinated by a scuff mark on his shoe.

"That's... that's Glitterati's table," Flint finally managed to say, his voice low.

The name dropped into the room like a chunk of collapsed reality. Glitterati. The celebrity goddess. A woman whose entire existence was a monument to fame. She didn't follow trends; she was the algorithm that created them. Her followers' collective belief gave her the power to bend the city to her will. She was, for all intents and purposes, untouchable. To accuse her of a crime would be like accusing the sun of being too bright. The city's very structure would reject the notion.

This was the turning point. This wasn't just a weird case anymore. It was a political and metaphysical death sentence. My goal had shifted from understanding the scene to simply surviving it.

"Her narrative thread is all over this," I said, more to myself than to them. The surprise wasn't that a celebrity was a suspect; in Aethelburg, power corrupted absolutely. The surprise was the sheer audacity of it. To erase a concept so completely required a terrifying amount of power.

"You didn't hear that," Flint said quickly. "The case is impossible. It'll be closed by morning. An anomalous manifestation. A reality hiccup. Whatever you want to call it. Just not... a crime."

He was right. The ABI wouldn't touch it. They'd file it under "Unknowable" and scrub the records. But the monochrome man on the table deserved more than that. No one deserved to be a typo in the grand story, deleted and forgotten. That was a fate I understood too well.

As if the universe decided to punctuate my thoughts, a new sound entered the room. It was soft at first, a high, thin chime.

Plink. Plonk.

I looked around. My eyes landed on the large, ornate mirrors that lined the restaurant walls, reflecting the impossible scene a dozen times over.

And from the bottom edge of each mirror, a single, silver tear trickled down the glass. Then another. And another. The reflections in the mirrors began to warp and twist, the monochrome corpse stretching, the colors of the room bleeding into each other like wet paint. The sound grew, a chorus of cracking glass and a thousand stifled sobs.

The scene was becoming unstable. The very fabric of the place was weeping from the stress of the paradox.

Flint and Shimmer backed away, their professional composure shattering. This was beyond them. This was reality itself breaking down.

But I held my ground, my gaze fixed on the weeping reflections. Because in the distorted glass, something new was taking shape. A face, elegant and blurred, was emerging from the silver tears. And on its lips, a playful, dangerous smirk.

The case was already spinning out of my control. And things were only just getting started.