The second Mind-Blanker sealed against his skin with a firmer click, and the pressure inside his skull deepened into something almost architectural. Sound flattened into layers. The world did not quiet, exactly, but it narrowed into manageable dimensions. The hum became a boundary.
His father's body had already begun to look unfamiliar. Without breath, the old man seemed smaller, as if decades of disciplined tension had evaporated in the space between heartbeats. His jaw slackened. His fingers lay open against the table.
Open.
Caelum adjusted them, closing the hands gently. Receptiveness suggested continuation. Continuation suggested potential.
He crossed the room and retrieved a matte cloth from storage, draping it carefully over the body. He covered the face last, but he did not hesitate when the fabric passed over his father's eyes. Hesitation encouraged fixation, and fixation sharpened memory.
The shard still lay where it had fallen.
He crouched and examined it without allowing his gaze to linger too long. It was small—no longer than a segment of finger bone—triangular but subtly curved, as if cut from something aerodynamic. Its edges were too clean to be accidental. Within it, faint internal lines intersected in geometric precision, refracting the ambient amethyst haze into muted bands of impossible color. It did not flicker.
Impulse Fractures flickered. They trembled, misaligned, destabilized. This did none of those things.
That stability unsettled him.
His Mind-Blankers did not warn.
He reached toward it slowly, breath measured, pulse even. When his fingers made contact, the hum in his skull wavered—not in alarm, but in recognition. The shard was warm. Not hot. Not cold. Responsive.
He withdrew his hand at once.
It remained inert.
He tried again, this time holding his thoughts in strict abstraction—angles, stress tolerances, load-bearing equations. No metaphor. No memory. He lifted it carefully. The refracted light shifted across the ceiling in faint intersecting patterns before settling again.
It was not heavy, but it felt deliberate.
He wrapped it in matte cloth and slid it into the hidden recess beneath the floor panel near his cot, the same recess where his father had once stored emergency suppressors during early saturation years. The panel fit back into place with satisfying precision.
Outside, boots struck pavement in disciplined cadence.
Patrol.
Caelum extinguished the heating unit and dimmed the interior lights. He moved to the narrow polymer slit that functioned as a window. It did not reveal the street clearly—only blurred gradients and shadow.
Two figures passed. Reinforced coats. Dual Mind-Blankers at their temples. One carried a containment rod of dull alloy. Their movements were efficient, restrained.
One of them paused.
Turned slightly toward the house.
Caelum's breathing remained steady.
The patrolman lifted a small resonance gauge designed to detect probability fluctuations beyond baseline. Its indicator glowed faintly before stabilizing.
The patrol moved on.
Caelum waited a count of one hundred before stepping away.
The body required disposal before density hours peaked. In a city frozen in Violet, time was measured not by light but by pressure variance. Collective withdrawal thickened probability fields unpredictably. Transporting a corpse during peak density increased risk of unintended structure.
He took the leather journal from the table. It felt older than the house itself, worn smooth at the edges. There were no markings on the cover. Opening it now would be indulgence, and indulgence sharpened narrative. He slid it into his coat instead.
Later, when he could control the narrative.
He returned to the table and lifted his father carefully. The old man was lighter than he thought. That thought nearly triggered a warning tone; he flattened it immediately.
Weight was measurable. Memory was not.
He secured the body with transport straps and hoisted it over his shoulder, redistributing the strain across his frame.
Outside, the district held its breath. Doors were sealed. Voices suppressed. Every household had retreated inward as Silence Hours deepened.
Halfway down the block, the air rippled.
This time it was not a flicker but a vertical seam, stretching from pavement into the amethyst haze above. Within it, something pressed against permeability—elongated limbs, uncertain joints, anatomy negotiating its own existence.
A woman's sob broke the quiet and was quickly strangled.
Caelum lowered his gaze and began reciting prime numbers beneath his breath. Two. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven.
The sob became a scream.
The Fracture lunged outward in incomplete anatomy, spine too long, limbs misaligned, face indistinct but desperate. He did not accelerate. Acceleration implied urgency, and urgency carried emotion.
The patrol rounded the corner with controlled speed. One struck the entity with precise force, disrupting its unstable symmetry. The other threw a triangular contraption at it activating a localized red gravity field. The Fracture convulsed, lost cohesion, and collapsed into brittle shards of violet light.
Silence reasserted itself.
The woman was escorted indoors. No one looked at Caelum, and he did not look at them. Grief was contagious under Violet.
At the cremation corridor entrance, the registrar barely looked up. His triple Mind-Blankers hummed in layered dissonance, faint violet rings pulsing asynchronously at his temples. Endless saturation had carved hollows beneath his eyes that no suppression could smooth.
"Name?" the registrar asked quietly.
"Vire. Dorian."
A pause as the registrar marked it into a slate panel with a stylus. No digital registry; electronics warped under prolonged permeability.
"Cause?"
"Neural fatigue."
The registrar's hand stilled for a fraction of a second.
It was common.
That made it worse.
He nodded once and gestured toward the sealed chamber.
The corridor beyond was matte stone and reinforced alloy, built low and narrow to discourage lingering thought. No windows. No reflective surfaces. No sound beyond the steady compression hum of the furnace systems embedded deep beneath the floor.
Caelum carried his father alone.
There were no attendants.
The transport platform waited at waist height, dull and utilitarian. He lowered the body onto it with care that bordered on precision. He adjusted the cloth once more—not because it was misaligned, but because misalignment implied carelessness.
He did not remove the covering from his father's face.
He did not need to see it again.
The platform began to slide forward automatically once weight registered. Slow. Mechanical. Unhurried.
Caelum followed one step closer than protocol allowed.
The chamber door stood open—a thick circular iris of red compression-grade alloy. Inside, there was no visible flame. Under endless Violet, combustion had changed. Fire did not dance; it collapsed.
A low gravitational field activated first.
He felt it in his knees—a subtle downward pull, heavier than baseline. The body on the platform seemed to settle deeper into itself.
Compression began.
The cloth tightened along the shape beneath it.
His father's outline narrowed.
Caelum's breath nearly hitched.
He imagined—dangerously—his father younger. Standing straight. Correcting his posture. Hands firm on his shoulders, guiding him through early suppression drills. Teaching him how to flatten fear before it became structure.
The Mind-Blanker pulsed sharply.
Warning.
He forced the memory to blur.
The platform crossed the threshold.
The iris began to close.
For a moment—one fragile, unguarded moment—he wanted to say something. Not a goodbye. Not even a name. Just a sound that acknowledged transition.
But sound carried narrative weight.
Narrative invited density.
He remained silent.
The chamber sealed with a heavy, airtight finality.
Inside, the compression field intensified. There was no scream of flame. No crackle. Only a deepening hum, like distant thunder contained within metal walls.
The hum grew lower.
Denser.
The stone beneath his boots vibrated faintly.
Matter reduced under pressure, not spectacle.
Efficient.
Controlled.
He stood until the vibration ceased.
When the indicator light shifted from violet to neutral gray, the registrar pressed a lever. A narrow drawer extended from the side of the chamber, holding a small sealed container.
No ash visible.
No bone fragments.
Everything reduced to fine particulate, compressed and stabilized against probability bleed.
The registrar handed it to him without ceremony.
Caelum accepted the container.
It was warm.
He had expected that.
What he had not expected was the weight.
Not physical weight.
The container was light.
But the knowledge inside it pressed against something in his chest that he could not mathematically redistribute.
For a dangerous instant, he imagined opening it.
Imagined scattering the contents into the air.
Imagined what might take form if decades of disciplined suppression were released all at once.
A figure rising.
Not monstrous.
Severe, correcting and disappointed.
The Mind-Blanker shrieked in sharp reprimand.
He crushed the thought before it could sharpen further.
The image shattered into abstraction.
He tightened his grip on the container until his knuckles whitened beneath his coat sleeve.
The registrar watched him carefully—not suspicious, but measuring stability.
"You may deposit remains in the municipal vault," the registrar said. "Or retain privately."
Retain privately.
To keep his father in the house.
Under Violet.
Within range of memory.
That was risk.
He shook his head once.
"Vault."
The registrar nodded and took the container back, sliding it into a recessed chamber lined with suppressive alloy. Hundreds of similar compartments filled the wall behind him. Each one a life reduced to regulated dust.
Each one quiet.
Caelum stood a moment longer than necessary.
He realized, with cold clarity, that this was the last physical interaction he would ever have with his father. No body. No object. No texture. Only memory remained.
And memory, here, was volatile.
He turned away before the pressure inside him could spike.
As he stepped back into the corridor, the endless Violet beyond the sealed exit felt closer than before—not brighter, not darker. Just nearer. As though it had been waiting patiently for this reduction.
For this thinning.
Outside, somewhere in the district, something howled into existence.
Caelum did not look.
He walked home with measured steps, carrying nothing.
And for the first time in his life, he understood that grief in a world like this was not loud.
It was compression.
On the walk home, the pressure felt marginally heavier—not because Violet had intensified, but because something within him had thinned.
Inside the house, he sealed the door and leaned against it briefly, recalibrating. He removed one Mind-Blanker; the hum softened and the world expanded a fraction. The expansion felt dangerous. He replaced it immediately.
Control was safety.
The phrase felt stable. Reliable.
He crossed to the floor panel and lifted it just enough to confirm the shard remained. It lay silent and perfectly still, refracting the faint amethyst haze into restrained geometry.
Waiting.
He lowered the panel and returned to his cot, lying flat with arms at his sides. He attempted to recall his father as he had been before illness—broad-shouldered, stern, steady-handed. The image began to sharpen. Wrinkles smoothed. Shoulders broadened. The Mind-Blanker pulsed in warning.
He allowed the image to dissolve before it gained resolution.
The ceiling returned to blank matte.
Measured breathing.
In this world, love required rationing.
Violet did not recede. It did not dim. It endured.
Beneath his floor, a fragment of something vast and crystalline held its shape without flicker—a construct born not from panic, but from restraint.
Caelum closed his eyes and did not dream.
Outside, the sun hung unmoving in its amethyst haze, and somewhere inside the stillness, a new geometry had begun.