Sol did not fear death in its human sense.What he feared was visual silence.
Deep within an abandoned cellar beneath the ruins of Saint Lumière Cathedral in the city of Iris, the air was saturated with the stench of rotting linen and ancient turpentine oil. Time there pointed to nothing measurable; in this cellar, it was not counted in seconds, but in the layers of dust settling upon forgotten wooden frames.
Sol awoke to a faint sound of erosion, like paper being torn at an agonizingly slow pace.
He looked at his right hand—and a cold wave swept through his being.
It wasn't there.
There was no pain. No blood. No shattered bones.His fingers had turned into pale pencil lines, already fading, dissolving into fine gray particles drifting through the thin light seeping from the cracks in the ceiling.
"Damn it… reality is rejecting me again."
Sol was not a fully formed human.He was not born of a womb, nor did he possess a chromatic birth certificate. He had come into existence three years ago inside the frame of a torn, abandoned painting in the corner of this very cellar.
He was a Sketch—unfinished by its creator—who had fled into the world of the Completed, where everything had shadow, color, and solid mass. Sol had none of that. He was a wandering idea, an unfinished dream, a being fighting every second not to be erased by laws of nature that recognized only three-dimensional bodies.
He rose with difficulty, his body trembling like a distorted image in an old camera lens that had never been properly focused. From a distance, his shirt looked real—but up close, coarse brushstrokes were visible in its fabric. His face lacked fine details; his left eye was nothing more than a deep black void, while his right pulsed with a strange electric blue—the only complete part of him, and the sole source of his power.
He staggered toward the eastern wall, where a faded oil painting of a medieval fish market hung crookedly. Extending his line-like hand—now little more than a skeletal trace of dull graphite—he reached toward the canvas.
His fingers did not touch the surface.
They sank into the red pigment of a merchant's shirt painted centuries ago.
Sol initiated existential absorption.
Slowly, the red pigment flowed from the painting into his paper veins. His erased hand began to regain form, his skin acquiring a pallor like fine cardboard stock. He exhaled deeply as his drawn heart beat stronger.
He had stolen a fragment of reality to survive one more day in a world trying to erase him.
Then—
A sharp, unnatural white light burst through the cracks of the cellar's iron door, followed by a cold mechanical hum—a sound that made it feel as though the air itself was being purified.
"Unclassified existential signature detected…Visual distortion exceeding 40%…Target confirmed: escaped Sketch in lower sector."
Sol froze.
The Erasers.
The cosmic organization operating under the Council of Colors, for whom beings like Sol were nothing but visual contamination—imperfections that had to be removed to preserve the purity of the grand painting they called reality.
The door did not open by force.The space it occupied was simply deleted.
A man stepped through, clad in a pristine white coat untouched by dust. His face was hidden behind a glass mask that reflected light, erasing all human features. In his right hand, he carried a crystalline prism glowing with blinding white light. In his left, a case filled with erasure acids.
"You are disrupting visual balance," the Eraser said in a flat, emotionless voice."Your existence fractures perspective and generates illogical shadows in this district. Prepare to have your particles restored to nothingness."
Sol had no conventional weapon—no gun, no blade.
But he possessed something far more terrifying:the ability to redefine absence.
He focused his pulsing blue eye on the wooden floor beneath the Eraser's feet. To Sol, wood was not solid—it was a collection of fibers and lines placed there by the First Painter.
In his mind, he envisioned a massive eraser sweeping across the area.
With a finger sharpened into a precise graphite edge, he drew an X in the air, following the laws of broken spatial geometry.
Reality shuddered.
The floor did not crack.It did not collapse.
It ceased to exist.
In its place yawned a gray abyss—a region devoid of matter, like a blank sheet before the first stroke of a pen.
The Eraser fell.
He screamed, but the sound vanished instantly—there was no air for it to travel through. Within seconds, reality repaired itself. The wooden floor returned as if nothing had happened.
The Eraser did not.
He was gone forever, lost in the Margins.
Sol did not celebrate.
He knew the Erasers' scanners had already sent a distress signal—and that the Critics, higher-ranked and far deadlier, were on their way.
He ran toward the cellar's single high window. There was no ladder, and his incomplete body could not jump.
So he did what he did best.
From his pocket, he pulled a piece of sacred charcoal, stolen long ago from an ancient studio, and drew the shadow of a wooden ladder on the wall.
The ladder was not real.
But for Sol—who existed in the liminal space between drawing and reality—the shadow was enough.
He stepped onto the first rung's shadow and climbed the wall as though walking on air, emerging through the window.
Outside, Iris stretched before him like a colossal oil painting steeped in melancholy. The sky was dark gray. Towering Gothic buildings overlapped in impossible geometries. Street lamps didn't illuminate—they distorted, casting twisted shadows.
Sol sprinted across rooftops. His body felt dangerously light—a sign that the red pigment was running out.
He needed to reach the Refuge of Forgotten Lines before dawn, or he would fade into an invisible ink stain on the pavement.
Mid-leap between chimneys, something stopped him.
From the city's heart, where the Seven-Color Spire rose, a beam of dark purple light erupted.
The color of total purification.
"They're sealing reality…" Sol whispered, his voice like tearing paper.
Then—pressure.
He turned.
A woman stood on the edge of a nearby rooftop. She wore no white uniform, but a long black dress that flowed like liquid ink. In her hand was a massive metal quill, dripping gold.
Lucia the Critic.
"An interesting Sketch," she said, her gaze fixated on Sol's blue eye with lethal curiosity."An Eye of Eternal Pigment… and a body of cheap graphite. You're an aesthetic contradiction that cannot be tolerated. Do you know what we do with drawings that ruin the composition?"
Sol raised his hand to draw a defense—
Too slow.
With a graceful flick of her quill, Lucia drew a golden shackle in the air. It snapped around Sol's wrists, hardening into metal that weighed tons, slamming him to his knees on the cold tiles.
"You don't understand," she said softly, stepping closer, her footsteps soundless."The world is not for everyone. It is a painting that must be perfect. And you—you are a mistake made by a drunken painter centuries ago. I'm here to correct it."
Sol looked at her.
Desperation ignited something inside him.
His blue eye flared brighter than ever.
He no longer saw Lucia as a woman—but as overlapping brushstrokes. He saw a tiny point in her chest where all her lines converged.
Her Point of Dissolution.
"If I am a mistake," Sol said, his voice sharpening like metal,"then I'll make this world understand that mistakes are what give art its meaning."
Instead of breaking the shackle, Sol redrew his own weight.
He imagined his body turning into transparent white—the color with no mass.
In an instant, he became intangible as smoke. The golden restraints slid off his wrists and shattered the tiles below.
Before Lucia could react, Sol lunged—not to strike her, but to touch her Point of Dissolution with a finger transformed into a spear of pure graphite.
"Partial Erasure!"
Blue-and-black light exploded.
Lucia screamed as part of her perfection was torn away. She staggered back, a section of her inky veil fading into pale stains.
Sol seized the moment.
He didn't flee across rooftops.
He leapt into the void between buildings, where no ground existed.
He did not fall.
In his mind, he drew a bridge of words and ran upon invisible air—toward the deepest mystery of Iris, where legend claimed the First Painter had left behind the Mythic Eraser, capable of erasing fate itself.