In the city of Lumen-9, where the rain falls in monochrome and streetlights burn in sepia tones, people trade in pigments.
- A vial of cerulean blue buys a day without sorrow.
- A palmful of crimson can erase a regret.
- But true gold? That’s only found in memories of joy—and it’s vanishing.
The Paper King rules here. He drifts through the streets in a suit of newspaper clippings, his face a shifting collage of yesterday’s headlines. He owns all the colors.
And then there’s Wren, a girl made of negative space.
Where she walks, the world loses saturation—fruits gray out in her hands, murals peel into pencil sketches. She doesn’t remember how she became this way. She only knows two things:
- The Paper King is looking for her.
- She’s the only one who can fold a memory without creasing it.
The Heist of a Hundred Hues
Wren is recruited by The Chroma Circus, a troupe of rogue performers who steal colors back from the Paper King’s vaults:
- A contortionist who can squeeze between wavelengths of light.
- A fire-eater who burns memories to ash and exhales new colors.
- A mime trapped inside an invisible cube, slowly turning transparent.
Their plan? Break into the Palace of Prismatics, where the Paper King hoards the city’s stolen luminance. But Wren suspects they want more than liberation—they want to fold the King himself into a harmless paper crane.
The Truth About Wren
She discovers why she’s different:
She wasn’t born. She was unwritten.
The Paper King once tried to erase a man so thoroughly that even the memory of him rebelled—and Wren is that rebellion given form. A walking act of resistance made of everything the King tried to destroy.
And the circus?
They’re not rebels.
They’re her forgotten family, slowly fading because she can’t remember them.
The Final Performance
In the climax, the mime shatters his invisible prison, the fire-eater ignites the King’s newspaper robes, and Wren does the impossible—
She folds the Paper King into a map.
Not to destroy him.
To show him what he’s done.
The creased paper blooms into a panorama of Lumen-9 as it should be—vibrant, unfiltered, alive. And for the first time, the King sees the cost of his control.
But the victory is bittersweet.
With every color returned, Wren’s own existence fades. She was never meant to last in a world this bright.
The Choice
The mime (her brother, she remembers now) presses a vial of gold into her hands—his last happy memory.
"Drink it," he says. "It’ll anchor you."
But if she does, he’ll forget her forever.