The Color of Feeling

In the year 2142, the sky was always grey.

Not because of clouds or pollution, but by design. The World Order of Harmony had decided long ago that color sparked emotion, and emotion was dangerous. Wars, jealousy, passion, rebellion—they all came from feeling. So they drained it from the world.

The cities were built from neutral stone and polished metal. Clothes came in two shades: grey and white. Art was banned. Music was algorithmic. Smiles were polite but shallow, like flickers of light with no heat.

And every morning, citizens received their dose of Reguline—a serum that dulled the mind just enough to keep everything calm.

Fifteen-year-old Coren didn’t feel like the others.

Not quite.

He took his doses like everyone else, walked the streets in silence, answered questions with practiced neutrality. But in his dreams, he saw color. Vibrant, impossible color. Crimson skies. Emerald trees. People laughing so loudly it hurt. Sometimes, he woke with tears on his face—a strange liquid he couldn’t explain to his caretakers.

"Possible allergy," they would say, adjusting his dose.

But the dreams returned.

One day, while delivering packages to the outer district, Coren passed a crumbling wall. Most old ruins had been sanitized, scrubbed clean of the past. But this one still bore a mark—a symbol scratched into the stone.

A blue feather.

Blue. It had a name.

And when he looked at it, something in his chest clenched, like the feeling of running too far, or losing something you never had.

That night, he returned.

The symbol was still there, and beside it, a door cracked open by age and weather. Inside, a spiral staircase descended into darkness. He hesitated only a moment before stepping through.

Below the ruin was a hidden room—a vault of forbidden things. Paintings. Sketchbooks. Candles. Books with titles like The Human Heart and The Fire Within. And at the center of it all: a girl with violet hair.

She turned toward him, and he saw something in her eyes he’d never seen before.

Fear.

"You shouldn’t be here," she said. “They’ll track you.”

Coren tried to speak, but his voice caught in his throat. She held up a finger, then tapped a device strapped to her wrist.

The silence in his head lifted.

He gasped.

“I... I can hear myself,” he said aloud.

The girl gave a sad smile. “Your suppressant chip. I scrambled it. Only temporary.”

She introduced herself as Sol. She had been born outside the Harmony Walls, in the Freezones where emotion still lived in hiding. She had come to the city to find others like her—dreamers, feelers, color-seers.

“I saw you pause at the wall,” she said. “The others never look twice.”

Coren looked around the room. “What is this place?”

“A sanctuary,” she said. “Before the world went grey, artists hid their work. Some say they believed the future would need reminders of what it lost.”

Coren reached out and touched a painting—a red sun rising over golden fields. The canvas was warm.

“Why are they afraid of this?” he whispered.

Sol’s voice hardened. “Because color makes people feel. And feelings make people free.”

They met in secret every night. She taught him about music—real music, not Harmony-code. About painting. About poetry. She gave him a sketchpad, and he filled it with what he saw in his dreams.

And then one day, the agents came.

Black-suited enforcers, their helmets flashing with red sensors. Sol fought them. Coren ran. He didn’t stop until he reached the roof of the Harmony Tower, the highest point in the city.

The sketchpad was still in his bag.

And in that moment, he understood what he had to do.

He pulled it out and opened it to the final page: a painting he had finished just the night before. A boy standing in a sea of grey, holding a single brush, painting the sky blue.

He raised it high.

Cameras on nearby buildings locked onto him. The city’s network went live. Billions of emotionless faces across the globe looked up at their screens.

And for the first time in a century, they saw color.

Real, living color.

Some gasped. Some dropped their glasses. Some felt the first tears of their lives slide silently down their cheeks.

Then the signal cut.

Coren was never seen again.

But something had broken.

Within days, murals began appearing on blank walls. Secret songs played in hidden corners. Children whispered the names of colors in school hallways.

Blue.

Gold.

Crimson.

And across the world, in places both free and controlled, people began to feel.

The sky stayed grey for a while longer.

But not forever.