The Fading

Natalie awoke to a world draining of pigment.

The crimson sunrise that usually painted her bedroom wall had transmuted into a pale, anemic gray. She blinked, convinced her eyes were playing tricks—perhaps a storm had rolled in overnight, muting the dawn’s usual splendor. Yet when she reached for her phone, its once-vibrant screen glowed only in gradients of ash and charcoal.

“What the hell?” she whispered, her voice strange and hollow in the muted space.

The vermilion dress she’d laid out for today’s exhibition hung like a ghost on her closet door, now rendered in the same lifeless slate as everything else. Natalie pressed her palms against her eyelids, applying pressure until phosphenes sparked behind them—the only colors left in her universe.

As an artist whose reputation was built on revolutionary use of color, this perceptual aberration was more than unsettling—it was existentially threatening. Her exhibition opened tonight. “Prismatic Consciousness,” they’d called it in the press releases. The irony might have made her laugh if panic weren’t already climbing her spine like a spider.

Natalie fumbled for her brushes, her hands trembling as she uncapped what should have been cobalt blue. The paint oozed out in a dismal shade of pewter. Her breathing quickened, shallow gasps that seemed to echo in the monochromatic stillness of her studio apartment.

Her phone buzzed—a text from Eliza, her gallery manager. Are you seeing this?

So it wasn’t just her. Relief and terror collided in her chest.

Natalie moved to the window, drawing back curtains that should have been emerald green but now swayed like corpse-gray seaweed. Outside, the city stretched before her in perfect gradations of shadow and light—a world rendered in graphite and silver nitrate. People stood frozen on sidewalks, gazing skyward or at their phones, expressions caught between confusion and dread.

She remembered a conversation with Professor Whitman during her final year at art school. “Color doesn’t exist,” he’d said, tapping his temple. “It’s merely the brain interpreting different wavelengths of light. Without perception, the universe exists in darkness.”

Had perception itself somehow broken? Had humanity collectively lost the ability to see the spectrum that had defined their visual reality since the beginning of consciousness?

Natalie’s phone rang, Eliza’s name flashing on the screen.

“Are you okay?” Eliza’s voice sounded distant, filtered through static.

“I don’t—I don’t know,” Natalie managed. “Everything’s—”

“Gray. I know. It’s everywhere. The news is calling it ‘The Fading.’ Nobody knows what’s happening.”

Natalie pressed her forehead against the cool glass of her window. “My exhibition—”

“Is the least of our concerns right now,” Eliza interrupted. “There are reports of accidents, people panicking. The authorities are asking everyone to stay inside until they understand what’s happening.”

But what authorities could possibly comprehend this? What scientist could explain the overnight extinction of an entire sensory dimension?

“I need to understand this,” Natalie said, more to herself than to Eliza. “I’m going outside.”

“Natalie, don’t—”

She ended the call, slipping into what had once been her favorite scarlet boots. Now they were merely another shade in the universal grayscale that had become her reality.

Stepping outside felt like walking into an old photograph—one of those ancient daguerreotypes where the subjects had to remain perfectly still, their eyes haunted by the knowledge that the camera was stealing something ineffable from them. The air felt thicker somehow, as though the absence of color had altered its very composition.

A child stood on the sidewalk, weeping while his mother knelt beside him.

“But where did all the colors go?” he sobbed. “Did someone steal them?”

Natalie passed them, her artist’s heart constricting at the question’s terrible simplicity. In the distance, sirens wailed—a sound that seemed more appropriate now in this diminished world than it ever had in the vibrant one that existed just yesterday.

A man in a rumpled business suit approached, his eyes wild. “It’s judgment,” he hissed as he passed. “The beginning of endings.”

People had gathered in clusters, their voices a susurrus of confusion and theories. Natalie caught fragments as she moved through them—solar flares, government experiments, mass hallucination, divine intervention.

Then she saw it—a single, solitary exception to the universal monochrome. At the end of the street, a figure stood perfectly still. And draped around its shoulders, vivid and impossible, was a cloak of the deepest crimson she had ever seen.

The crimson cloak undulated in a breeze Natalie couldn’t feel, its hue so vivid against the ashen world that it seemed to pulsate with its own heartbeat. The figure wearing it stood motionless, a dark silhouette crowned by a shock of silver hair that caught what little light remained in this desaturated reality.

Natalie pushed through the gathering crowd, drawn toward the color like a moth to flame. Each step felt leaden, as though she were wading through invisible currents that sought to pull her back. The air grew colder as she approached, her breath crystallizing before her in delicate plumes of frost.

“You see it,” the figure said as Natalie drew near. Not a question, but a statement of fact. The voice was neither male nor female but something between and beyond—a sound like velvet dragged across broken glass.

“The red,” Natalie whispered, her voice catching. “It’s the only color left.”

The figure turned, revealing a face that seemed to shift and realign with each subtle movement, as though viewed through rippling water. Only the eyes remained constant—two perfect orbs of obsidian that reflected nothing, absorbed everything.

“Not left,” the figure corrected, lips barely moving. “Taken. Preserved.” A pale hand emerged from beneath the cloak, gesturing toward a leather satchel slung across a narrow chest. “I am a collector, you see. Of rare and vanishing things.”

Natalie’s gaze was transfixed by the bag. Something about its contours suggested impossible dimensions, as though it contained vastly more than its modest size should allow.

“You… you took the colors?” The question sounded absurd even as it left her lips, yet in this new reality, what remained of logic or reason?

The Collector’s mouth curved into what might have been a smile. “I preserve what is being forgotten. What is being… rejected.” The black eyes studied Natalie with unsettling intensity. “You’re an artist. You understand the value of color better than most.”

A cold dread uncoiled in Natalie’s stomach. “How do you know what I am?”

“I know many things about you, Natalie Davis. I know you mix your own pigments. I know you once stayed awake for seventy-three hours to capture the perfect shade of sunset on canvas. I know your dreams are saturated with colors that have no names in any human language.”

Each word fell between them like stones dropping into still water, creating ripples of disquiet that expanded outward. Behind them, the crowd had begun to notice the crimson cloak, voices rising in confusion and wonder. Someone shouted. Another began to weep.

“The world is forgetting how to see,” the Collector continued, seemingly oblivious to the growing commotion. “Humanity has trained itself to look without seeing, to register without appreciating. So I have… relieved you of the burden. For safekeeping.”

Natalie’s thoughts raced, fracturing and reassembling. “When you say ‘preserve’… you mean you’ve taken all color from the world? From everyone?”

“Merely holding it in trust.” The Collector’s hand caressed the leather satchel with disconcerting tenderness. “Until humanity remembers how to truly see.”

The crowd was drawing closer now, their collective murmuring growing louder, more urgent. Natalie could feel their desperation like a physical pressure against her back.

“Give them back,” she said, surprising herself with the steadiness of her voice. “You have no right.”

“Rights,” the Collector echoed, as though tasting the word. “Such an arbitrary concept. Did humanity have the right to take color for granted? To reduce the miracle of perception to mere data, to marketing tools, to meaningless preference?”

Within the satchel, something pulsed—a rhythmic glow that seeped through the worn leather in brief, dazzling bursts. Natalie caught glimpses of azure, emerald, amber—fleeting suggestions of the spectrum imprisoned within.

“You’re here because you recognize what’s missing,” the Collector said softly. “You feel its absence like a phantom limb. Others will adapt. They’ll forget there was ever anything beyond these shades of gray. In time, even you might forget.”

“I won’t forget,” Natalie said, her voice breaking. “I can’t.”

Something flickered across the Collector’s fluid features—interest, perhaps, or curiosity. “No? Then prove it.”

The Collector reached into the satchel and withdrew what appeared to be a small glass orb. Within it swirled a liquid color—a blue so profound it made Natalie’s chest ache with recognition. The exact shade of the ocean at dusk, the precise hue she’d spent years trying to capture in her work.

“If you truly understand what has been taken,” the Collector said, holding the orb between long, pale fingers, “then perhaps you deserve to keep this one small piece. A test, if you will.”

The orb hovered between them, its blue contents swirling hypnotically. Beyond them, the crowd had noticed the splash of color, their collective voice rising in a crescendo of need.

“What’s the test?” Natalie asked, unable to tear her gaze from the orb.

The Collector’s obsidian eyes gleamed. “Simply tell me what this color means. Not its name, not its wavelength, not its place in your human spectrum. Tell me its meaning, its essence.”

The question resonated through Natalie like a bell struck at the perfect frequency to shatter glass. How did one define the meaning of a color? Yet as she stared into the swirling blue, something crystallized within her—a truth so fundamental she wondered how she’d never articulated it before.

The crowd surged forward, hands outstretched toward the orb’s glow, faces contorted with desperate hunger. And in that moment, Natalie understood exactly what she had to do.

The blue orb pulsed between them like a captured heartbeat, its radiance casting ethereal patterns across the Collector’s alabaster features. Natalie felt the crowd pressing closer, their collective breath a tempest of need at her back. Time seemed to slow, each moment stretching like pulled taffy as the orb’s hypnotic swirls beckoned her deeper into its cerulean depths.

Within that suspended moment, memories unfurled like time-lapse flowers blooming in reverse—her grandmother’s faded periwinkle cardigan worn thin at the elbows; the indigo hour before complete darkness when the world held its breath; the cornflower-blue origami crane her first love had folded for her from a gum wrapper. Each recollection carried not just the visual imprint of blue, but the emotional architecture built around it—melancholy, possibility, tenderness.

“Blue is…” Natalie began, her voice barely audible above the crowd’s murmuring hunger. The words trembled on her tongue, insufficient vessels for the understanding that had crystallized within her.

“Blue is the space between,” she continued, more firmly now. “Between sky and earth, between water and air, between memory and future. It’s the color of distance and closeness simultaneously—the horizon that separates and connects.” Her fingers twitched at her sides, aching to capture this ephemeral knowledge on canvas.

The Collector’s obsidian eyes narrowed, face tilting with something approaching surprise. “Go on.”

Natalie’s gaze never left the orb as words spilled from her, elemental and raw. “Blue is the first breath after nearly drowning, the last glimpse of twilight before night consumes it. It’s the space we inhabit when we’re between what was and what will be—” Her voice caught, understanding blooming. “It’s liminality made visible.”

Something shifted in the Collector’s mercurial features—a ripple of recognition, perhaps even respect. The pale fingers tightened infinitesimally around the orb.

“Interesting,” the Collector murmured. “Most humans would have spoken of sadness, of sky, of conventional associations. You speak of thresholds.”

Behind them, the crowd had grown restless, reaching hands clawing at air. A man pushed forward suddenly, lunging toward the orb with a primal cry. Without appearing to move, the Collector shifted, and the man crumpled to his knees, gasping as though the oxygen had been extracted from his lungs.

“They grow impatient,” the Collector observed dispassionately. “Their hunger is… unrefined. Unlike yours.” Those black eyes pierced Natalie. “You may have this color back, Natalie Davis. For you alone.”

The orb hovered between them, its blue light pulsing with impossible yearning.

“Just for me?” Natalie whispered, the implications unfolding in her mind like poisonous flowers. To possess what others had lost, to see what others could not—it would be both gift and curse, blessing and isolation.

“Just for you,” the Collector confirmed. “A private spectrum for the one who truly understands its worth.”

The blue orb drifted closer, its light caressing Natalie’s face with cool fingers. She could almost taste it—the return of at least one fragment of the chromatic world she’d lost. Her fingers trembled as she reached toward it.

Then she saw them—the faces in the crowd behind the Collector. Bewildered children clutching parents’ hands; elderly couples supporting each other; strangers united in collective loss. Their expressions held the vacant desperation of those who couldn’t quite remember what they were missing, only that something essential had been stolen.

Natalie’s hand froze mid-reach. “No,” she said softly. Then again, more firmly: “No.”

The Collector’s head tilted, expressionless. “No?”

“I won’t accept what others cannot have.” Natalie’s voice strengthened with each word. “Color isn’t meant to be hoarded or awarded as privilege. It’s meant to be shared, to be experienced collectively.”

“How disappointing,” the Collector sighed. “I thought you, of all people, might appreciate the exclusivity of perception.”

“What I appreciate,” Natalie countered, “is that color exists as much between us as within us. It connects our experiences even when we perceive it differently.” She gestured toward her monochrome surroundings. “Even without it, we share its absence. That shared experience means more than my private indulgence.”

The crowd had grown silent, sensing the negotiation unfolding before them. The orb’s blue glow pulsed with increasing urgency, as if aware of its precarious fate.

“You refuse my gift?” The Collector’s voice carried a dangerous edge.

Natalie met those bottomless eyes without flinching. “I refuse your bribe. I want them all back—all the colors, for everyone.”

A smile curled the Collector’s lips, revealing teeth too sharp, too numerous. “And what would you offer in exchange? What could possibly equal the value of an entire dimension of perception?”

The question hung between them, weighted with impossible implications. Natalie felt rather than heard the collective intake of breath from the crowd behind her. Their hope pressed against her back like physical weight.

“My sight,” Natalie said, the words emerging with surprising calm. “Take my ability to see anything at all, and return color to everyone else.”

Gasps rippled through the crowd. The Collector went utterly still, those obsidian eyes widening fractionally—the first genuine surprise Natalie had seen on that fluid face.

“An artist offering blindness,” the Collector mused. “How… exquisite. The symmetry appeals to me.”

“Do we have a deal?” Natalie pressed, ignoring the tremor in her hands, the wild pounding of her heart.

The Collector circled her slowly, the crimson cloak whispering against the pavement. “You would sacrifice your primary sense—your artistic vision—for strangers? For a world that rarely notices the subtleties you dedicate your life to capturing?”

“Yes.” No hesitation now.

“Why?” The question slithered between them, deceptively simple.

Natalie thought of her grandmother explaining color theory while they folded laundry together; of children pointing excitedly at rainbows; of lovers arguing over whether a particular shade was turquoise or teal. A world without such moments would be immeasurably poorer.

“Because I’d rather live in darkness myself than in a world where no one can see color,” she answered. “Even if I can’t see it, I’ll know it exists. That others can experience it. That’s enough.”

Something like respect flickered across the Collector’s features. “A true sacrifice indeed.” Those pale fingers reached toward Natalie’s face. “Very well. Your blindness for the world’s chromatic vision. The exchange is… acceptable.”

Cool fingertips brushed Natalie’s eyelids. Pain exploded behind them—not sharp but vast, like the negative space after a supernova. She might have screamed; she wasn’t sure. The world lurched sickeningly, then faded to absolute darkness.

In that void, she heard gasps, exclamations, weeping—the sounds of a world suddenly restored to color. The leather satchel must have opened, releasing its captive spectrum. Natalie sank to her knees on the pavement, hands outstretched in the darkness that would now be her permanent reality.

“The bargain is complete,” the Collector’s voice murmured, already sounding distant. “Farewell, Natalie Davis. Your sacrifice was… noteworthy.”

Footsteps receded, then silence. Natalie remained kneeling, surrounded by sounds of wonder and renewal she could no longer see. Hands touched her shoulders—strangers offering support she hadn’t asked for but desperately needed.

“The colors,” she whispered. “Are they back? Please, tell me—are they back?”

“Yes,” a child’s voice answered, filled with awe. “The sky is blue again. Your hair is red, like fire. Everything’s so bright it hurts my eyes.”

Natalie smiled through her tears, seeing nothing but knowing everything. In her mind’s eye, colors bloomed with renewed vibrancy—not as visual phenomena but as emotional landmarks. She would carry them within her now, preserved in memory and imagination where even the Collector couldn’t reach.

“Help me home,” she said softly to whoever might be listening. “I have painting to do.”

Behind her sightless eyes, a new vision was already taking shape—one that would translate the darkness into her most profound work yet. She would paint what she remembered, what she felt, what she understood about color now that she could no longer see it.

And in the sky above the awakening city, colors rippled and danced with renewed vigor, as though grateful to be seen again by eyes that would never again take them for granted.