🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Body & Death | (33) BD-003-S
When the Skylooms began to hum, the village of Rhei turned lavender.
It was not a warning, though some would later say it was. The lavender hue washed over the stone paths, drifted across skin and shawl, and softened even the eyes of the animals. Sound had always been colored here, but never like this. Not since the time before memory.
In Rhei, the color of a voice mattered more than its words. Babies born screaming cerulean were fated for solitude. Laughter in saffron could end a marriage. The color of thunder determined the planting season, and no instrument was built until its future tone had been sung by a Dreamweaver and matched with pigment.
There was once a girl named Inel whose voice bore no color. Her family kept her quiet, believing her tones must be defective, incomplete. She learned early to listen more than speak, to observe the hues others left in their wake: how a lie shimmered sickly green before collapsing, how longing bled into the air in bruised burgundy, how old grief sang in dull maroon near the well.
Inel’s silence made her invisible to the Synesthetic Court, where color was law. But it also made her dangerous.
On the morning the Skylooms sang, Inel climbed the Hill of Vessels. This was not permitted. The hill was a place of resonance, where the wind passed through thousands of carved hollows left by stone-beetles over centuries. Each chamber caught a note. Each note, a shade.
The lavender still clung to the land like a second dawn. Inel stood barefoot at the summit. The wind there did not whisper. It painted. It painted her in streaks of glacial jade and ember-spun gold, though she made no sound.
She touched the oldest vessel, an orb the size of a child's skull, worn smooth by centuries of song. A chime rang out. Pale ivory light spiraled into the air, then bent back toward her.
Inel opened her mouth.
What emerged had no pitch, no rhythm. No timbre to name. It was not a sound. It was a question.
And it had no color.
The Skylooms answered.
They unfurled from the air like ribbons untied from the edge of perception, vast threads of resonance that had drifted too high for too long. Each loom had once held a note for the world, a great breath woven into form, but they had gone dormant when the people stopped listening beyond color.
Now they bent toward the girl who asked without hue.
They did not sing. They pulsed.
Below, the villagers dropped their tools. The streets glowed coral and chartreuse. Then indigo. Then pearl. Then black. The last frightened them. Black meant ending. It had only ever come once, in the last year of the Rain Prophet, when the language of clouds turned to flame.
But black held firm around the Hill of Vessels.
Inel’s voice, still colorless, peeled across the sky like a sheet of unmarked vellum. Wherever it passed, sound unshackled itself from pigment. A boy screamed, and it was only fear. A woman laughed, and it was joy alone. A bell tolled, and it meant time.
The Court fell into panic. Laws unraveled where hue had governed meaning. Accusations dissolved. Promises could no longer be judged true by the shade of syllables. The people grew still, unsure what remained of a world where sound had no visible truth.
Inel stood among the vessels, her throat raw but her breath steady. She had not spoken more than a dozen words in her life. But now the sky bent to her utterance. Not in obedience, but in understanding.
The Skylooms spun around her.
Each thread was stitched not with color, but with the intention of its making. Sorrow did not glow violet. It curled inward. Wonder did not sparkle gold. It expanded the space around it. Rage sparked, not red, but sharp. Forgiveness hovered, silent.
The villagers climbed the hill.
They found her seated among the vessels, eyes closed, mouth open. A song moved through her, one no longer bound to hue. One that needed no paint to be believed. One that could not be falsified by beauty.
And when they listened, not with eyes, but with presence, they wept.
Not because it was blue.
But because it was true.