Chapter 1: The Colorless Bleed

Chapter 1: The Colorless Bleed

The night was supposed to be predictable. That was its beauty. Elias Thorne clutched the cool metal of the rooftop railing, the city’s electric hum a familiar symphony beneath him. Below, rivers of headlights flowed through concrete canyons, a testament to order, to cause and effect. Above, the cosmos was set to perform its clockwork magic: the Perseids meteor shower, arriving right on schedule, just as humanity had calculated for centuries.

He checked the portable spectrometer in his hand again, a nervous habit. The device was his anchor to reality, a tool that translated the universe’s grand, chaotic poetry into the clean, hard prose of data. Its screen glowed with expected atmospheric compositions. Everything was normal.

“Lighten up, Eli,” Dr. Aris Thorne, his senior colleague, chuckled beside him, clapping a heavy hand on his shoulder. Aris was a man built like a retired linebacker who’d somehow fallen in love with gravitational lensing. “It’s a party, not a peer review. The universe isn’t going to fail its exam.”

Elias offered a thin, tired smile. The rooftop of the Kellerman Observatory was buzzing with academics, donors, and students, their faces upturned in shared anticipation. Glasses clinked. Laughter mingled with the soft thrum of ambient music. It was all perfectly, wonderfully normal. For a man whose life had become a frantic search for patterns in the cosmic noise, a night of guaranteed spectacle felt like coming up for air.

His phone buzzed. A text from his sister, Lily.

‘Sky looks pretty from my window. See any good ones yet? Don’t forget to make a wish, you grumpy scientist.’

A genuine smile touched his lips this time. He typed a quick reply. ‘Show hasn’t started. And wishes are statistically insignificant.’

He knew she’d roll her eyes, her painter’s soul finding his pragmatism exasperating. He was the rock; she was the water that flowed around it. Since their parents’ death, that dynamic had become the core equation of his life. Protecting her, providing a stable orbit for her brilliant, chaotic energy to revolve in, was his one non-negotiable constant.

“Here we go,” someone shouted. A collective gasp swept the rooftop.

The first meteor streaked across the inky black, a brilliant silver scratch against velvet. Then another, and another. A chorus of oohs and aahs followed, the predictable, satisfying payoff. Elias felt the tension in his shoulders ease. He raised his spectrometer, wanting to capture the spectral signature of the ablating rock, a small, selfish piece of data just for him.

And that’s when it happened.

It wasn't a sound. A sound would have been a mercy. It was a cessation. The music didn’t just stop; it felt like the concept of music had been erased. The chatter died not in a hush, but in a sudden, profound vacuum. Even the city’s endless hum seemed to fall away, as if the world itself was holding its breath.

Every head on the roof, including his own, was now locked on a single point in the sky.

Next to the constellation Cassiopeia, the fabric of the night was tearing.

It wasn't an explosion. It was a silent, surgical incision. A line of perfect, impossible blackness appeared, a wound in reality. Then, slowly, horribly, it began to open. From the tear, something bled.

It wasn’t light. Light has color, temperature, a source. This was an anti-color. A luminous absence that didn’t illuminate but erased. It spilled into the sky, a colorless tide that seemed to drain the spectrum from everything it touched. The city lights below flickered, their warm sodium yellows and cool LED whites turning a uniform, ghostly grey. The brilliant streaks of the meteors vanished as if they had never been.

Elias’s mind, trained to find explanations, raced through a rolodex of impossibilities. A localized atmospheric phenomenon? An equipment malfunction on a global scale? An undiscovered type of black hole? None of it fit. His scientific instrument was useless. The screen on his spectrometer flickered, displaying a cascade of error messages and nonsensical symbols that looked more like sigils than data.

The gaping wound in the sky—the Aperture, his mind numbly labeled it—pulsed. A slow, steady, silent beat. It was beautiful.

That was the most terrifying part. It was undeniably, breathtakingly beautiful. It was the beauty of a perfect, unsolvable equation, the sublime horror of watching a star collapse. A part of his brain, the primitive, pre-language part, wanted to fall to its knees.

He fought the urge, his knuckles white on the railing. He looked away from the sky, forcing his gaze onto the crowd. And the real horror began.

No one was screaming.

Aris, the boisterous, grounded physicist, was staring at the Aperture with tears streaming down his face. His mouth was open in a silent, ecstatic ‘O’. A young grad student nearby began to laugh, a gentle, melodic peal of pure, unadulterated joy. A well-dressed donor slowly, gracefully, tipped his champagne flute over the railing, watching the glass fall to the street below with serene detachment.

They were not afraid. They were enchanted.

A woman in a red dress began to move, her steps not a dance but a fluid, geometric pattern. She walked a perfect triangle around a potted plant, then a square, her body swaying in time with the silent pulse from the sky. Others began to join her, their movements strange and synchronized, their faces alight with blissful, idiotic smiles. They were like pilgrims who had just witnessed a miracle.

A joyful madness.

The thought hit Elias with the force of a physical blow. The phenomenon wasn't just in the sky; it was a signal, a broadcast, and it was rewriting the minds of everyone around him.

The spectrometer in his hand suddenly felt like a child’s toy. All his logic, his data, his years of study—they were a flimsy shield of paper against a tidal wave. The universe wasn't playing by the rules anymore. It had forgotten its own laws.

He felt a strange resonance in his own chest, a phantom echo of the sky’s pulse. A seductive whisper in his mind told him to just look up, to let go, to understand. The beauty was a language, and all he had to do was listen.

“No,” he rasped, the word scraping his throat.

Lily.

The name was a lightning strike in the fog of his mind. Lily. His sister. Intuitive, sensitive, fragile Lily. If this… thing… could do this to a pragmatist like Aris Thorne, what would it do to her? The image of her standing at her apartment window, staring up at this glorious, soul-eating void, filled him with a cold, primal terror that dwarfed the cosmic dread.

He had to get to her. That was the new equation. The only one that mattered.

He turned from the railing, shoving his now-useless device into his pocket. He pushed his way through the serene, swaying crowd. No one resisted. They parted for him like reeds in a gentle current, their eyes fixed on the sky, their faces luminous with the colorless bleed.

“Aris?” he tried, shaking his colleague’s shoulder.

Aris didn’t even blink. He simply raised a hand, not to push Elias away, but to trace the shape of the Aperture in the air, his expression one of profound reverence. He was already gone.

Elias stumbled toward the stairwell door, his heart hammering a frantic, discordant rhythm against the silent, steady pulse of the world. He glanced over his shoulder, one last look at the city.

The impossible was happening. The skyline, that familiar jagged line of steel and glass, was… bending. The spire of the Omni Tower seemed to be gracefully, languidly, curving in on itself like a wilting flower. A bridge in the distance looked less like a solid structure and more like a ribbon fluttering in a non-existent wind. The rigid geometry of his world was dissolving into a dreamscape.

He wrenched the heavy fire door open, the screech of its hinges a welcome, ugly, real sound in the profound silence. He threw himself into the concrete darkness of the stairwell, slamming the door shut, plunging himself into a momentary blindness.

His breath came in ragged sobs. His phone had no signal. He was alone. The only thing he could hear was the blood pounding in his ears, and the only thing he could see in his mind’s eye was the beautiful, terrible wound in the sky.

He started down the stairs, taking them two at a time, his only thought a mantra, a prayer to a god he didn’t believe in.

Lily. I have to get to Lily.