The Chromatic Drought

Detective Marcus Sein squinted at the fading landscape through his office window. Another day, another shade of gray lost to whatever this phenomenon was. The sky no longer held its azure expanse—just a flat, pale ceiling hanging lifelessly above a world growing increasingly two-dimensional.

"Three more reports of rivers running dry in the eastern district," Officer Palmer said, dropping a thin file onto Sein's desk. "And the hospital's reporting seventeen new cases of what they're calling 'chromatic dehydration,

Sein nodded grimly. The medical examiner had shown him the bodies last week—skin paper-thin, organs collapsed inward as if someone had extracted not just the water but the very substance from them. Their eyes, once spherical, had flattened to perfect circles, staring out from faces that resembled pencil sketches more than human remains.

"Any pattern to where it's spreading?" Sein asked, though he already knew the answer.

"None that makes sense," Palmer replied. "It's jumping between neighborhoods, between people who've never met. The only consistent thing is that once it starts in an area, everything there loses dimension within seventy-two hours."

Sein turned away from the window. His own hands seemed less substantial today—the knuckles less pronounced, the veins no longer raised beneath his skin. He'd taken to pressing his palms against solid objects throughout the day, reassuring himself that he could still feel texture, still interact with a three-dimensional world.

"What about the library research?" he asked.

Palmer's expression darkened. "Archives are becoming affected. Books are losing their ink—words disappearing from pages even as people try to read them."

This was worse than Sein had feared. Knowledge itself was being drained from the world.

---

The river had been the first to go in Westbrook. Once a vibrant blue-green artery cutting through the heart of the city, it had faded to a pale, silvery streak before disappearing entirely, leaving only a shallow depression in the ground where water had flowed for centuries.

Sein stood in the dry riverbed, feeling the cracked earth beneath his shoes. It didn't feel like drought—there was no sense of moisture having evaporated. Rather, it was as if the concept of "river" had been partially erased from reality, leaving behind this ghostly impression.

"Detective Sein?"

A woman approached him, her white lab coat nearly indistinguishable from the colorless landscape. Dr. Eliza Tanner, the city's leading physicist, had been studying the phenomenon since its first appearance three months ago.

"The process is accelerating," she said without preamble. "We've been measuring the dimensional collapse, and what took weeks in the beginning is now happening in days."

"How long?" Sein asked.

"Until complete two-dimensionality? For the entire planet?" She shrugged, the gesture oddly truncated, as if her shoulders couldn't quite complete their full range of motion. "At the current rate? Two weeks, maybe less."

Sein swallowed. "And then what?"

"I don't know," Dr. Tanner admitted. "But I found something you should see."

---

The university's rare book collection had been moved to a secure facility once the libraries began to empty. Dr. Tanner led Sein through rows of glass cases containing ancient texts, their pages increasingly blank as the phenomenon progressed.

"Most of our oldest manuscripts are already gone," she explained. "But this one is... different."

She stopped before a small display containing what appeared to be a journal bound in matte black leather. Unlike the other books, whose pages had turned a uniform white, this one's text remained stubbornly visible—though the letters seemed to shift and rearrange themselves whenever Sein tried to focus on them.

"It's resisting the effect," Dr. Tanner said. "And more importantly, it appeared in our collection the day the river began to fade. No record of acquisition, no catalog entry. It was simply... there."

Sein leaned closer. "Can you translate it?"

"Portions. It appears to be a record kept by something called 'The Society of Final Memory.' From what I can decipher, they were an ancient order dedicated to preserving knowledge through catastrophic events."

"Preserving knowledge? But everything's being erased."

Dr. Tanner's fingers trembled slightly as she adjusted her glasses—a gesture Sein noticed seemed less three-dimensional than it should have been.

"I think they made a mistake," she whispered. "A terrible one."

---

The journal led them to the underground chambers beneath the old cathedral. Sein had never known these catacombs existed, though they appeared to have been built centuries before the church itself.

"The Society maintained outposts throughout the world," Dr. Tanner explained as they descended the narrow stairs, flashlight beams cutting through dust that hung motionless in the air. "According to the journal, they believed humanity was cyclical—civilizations rising and falling in patterns, with crucial knowledge lost in each collapse."

"So they preserved information across these cycles?" Sein asked, ducking beneath a low archway. The stone felt wrong beneath his fingers—too smooth, as if the grain and texture were being slowly erased.

"Yes, but more than that. They developed a method to intentionally reset civilization if they deemed it necessary—a way to erase dangerous knowledge while preserving what they considered essential wisdom."

The stairway opened into a vast circular chamber. At its center stood a pedestal holding what appeared to be an obsidian sphere, the only object Sein had seen in weeks that still possessed a sense of depth and dimension. Surrounding it, slumped against the walls and floor, were desiccated bodies—or rather, what remained of them. They resembled paper cutouts more than corpses, flattened and colorless.

"The last active members of the Society," Dr. Tanner murmured. "They activated the device—the 'Mnemonic Purge,' they called it—but something went wrong."

Sein approached the sphere cautiously. Unlike everything else in this fading world, it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it—a perfect three-dimensional void amid the increasingly two-dimensional reality.

"The journal says the Purge was meant to be selective," Dr. Tanner continued, her voice growing thinner, less substantial. "To remove specific knowledge while leaving the fundamental structure of reality intact. But they miscalculated. Instead of erasing dangerous information, they started erasing the fundamental properties of existence—dimension, color, substance—and now it's spreading like a contagion throughout reality."

Sein reached toward the sphere, feeling a strange pull. "Can it be reversed?"

"The journal wasn't clear, but—" Dr. Tanner's words cut off abruptly.

Sein turned to find her frozen in place, her form suddenly flat against the wall like a photograph. Her mouth was open in mid-sentence, but no sound emerged. Before his eyes, her image seemed to lose resolution, details blurring until she resembled a rough sketch more than a person.

"Dr. Tanner!" He reached for her, but his hand passed through where her shoulder should have been. She wasn't just flat—she was becoming insubstantial.

Sein turned back to the sphere in horror. The loss of dimensionality was accelerating. He could feel it in his own body—his lungs laboring to expand in three dimensions when reality only permitted two. His vision narrowing as his eyeballs flattened into circles.

The journal had described the Purge as a reset—a way to begin civilization anew. But this wasn't renewal. This was erasure.

With the last of his dimensional strength, Sein grasped the obsidian sphere. It burned cold against his palms—the sensation almost nostalgic, a reminder of when touch had depth and texture. If the Society had started this, perhaps their tool could end it.

The sphere pulsed beneath his touch, and Sein had the distinct sensation of something ancient and aware turning its attention toward him. Not a machine but an entity—a consciousness that had been waiting, perhaps for centuries, for someone to recognize the terrible mistake.

*You understand,* a voice whispered directly into his mind. *The cycle was corrupted. The purge incomplete.*

"How do I stop it?" Sein gasped, feeling his vocal cords flattening, his words becoming as thin as paper.

*The purge cannot be stopped. But it can be completed correctly.*

The sphere began to glow with an impossible light—not white or any color Sein could name, but something that suggested all colors at once, dimensions beyond the three he knew.

*Choose what remains,* the voice commanded. *What essence of your world must survive to build anew?*

Sein understood then. The Society hadn't intended to destroy reality but to curate it—to select which elements would survive the transition to the next cycle. Their failure had been one of judgment, not mechanism.

As his consciousness expanded into the sphere, Sein saw the entirety of his fading world—every person, place, and memory collapsing into flatness. And beyond that, he glimpsed other worlds, other cycles, stretching back through countless iterations of humanity.

With his final three-dimensional thought, Sein made his choice.

---

"Hey Jimmy, you still reading that comic?" Mrs. Abernathy called from behind the drugstore counter. "Those new Detective Sein stories are all black and white now that the war's on. Not much to look at."

Twelve-year-old Jimmy Marshall didn't look up from the final panels of "Detective Sein and the Mystery of the Vanishing World." He traced his finger over the stark black and white illustrations—the flattened city, the mysterious sphere, the hero's final choice.

"I don't mind, Mrs. Abernathy," he replied. "The story's better than the colors anyway."

He turned to the last page, where Detective Sein stood before a newly dimensional world, color bleeding back into the edges of the panel as rivers began to flow again and people regained their solid forms. The final caption read: "And so Sein chose to preserve not knowledge or power, but the capacity for dimension itself—the ability to grow, to change, to become more than flat impressions on a finite page."

Jimmy closed the comic carefully. Outside the shop window, a military convoy rumbled past, headed for the docks and then across the Atlantic. The world was at war, resources were scarce, and luxuries like colored ink for comics were among the first casualties on the home front.

But as he stepped outside into the April sunshine, Jimmy couldn't help seeing the world a little differently—noticing the subtle depths and dimensions that existed even in the harshest of times, the colors that persisted even when they couldn't be printed on a page.

He tucked the comic securely under his arm and headed home, unaware that in his hands he carried one of the last remaining artifacts of a civilization that had faded not once but countless times before—each cycle preserved, paradoxically, within the flat, two-dimensional pages of a story that refused to be forgotten.