Morning at the Towers

Canvas Forest City woke up loud and colorful every morning — birds painted in twenty shades of orange, shop windows glowing yellow, and the Paintbrush Thicket rising right in the middle of it all like a crown of enormous bristles reaching toward the sky.

Paintbrush Buck stood at the edge of his favorite tower, sixty feet above the city streets, his blue supersuit catching the breeze. He had his giant blue paintbrush resting across one shoulder and was pretending, very seriously, to count clouds.

"You're not counting clouds," said a voice below him.

He looked down. Maple, a doe with copper-brown fur and a bright orange scarf, stood on the balcony beneath him with a cup of tea and an extremely unconvinced expression.

"I might be," Buck said.

"You've been staring at the same cloud for ten minutes."

"It's a complicated cloud."

Maple laughed, and for a moment, Canvas Forest City felt absolutely perfect.

Something in the Sky Isn't Right

Maple's laughter hadn't even faded when Buck noticed it.

The orange in her scarf looked wrong. Paler. Like someone had turned a dial down.

"Your scarf," he said.

She looked at it. "What about it?"

"It was brighter. Just now."

Maple held the fabric up in the morning light. She squinted. The orange was definitely duller — not dirty, not wet, just... less.

Then a drone buzzed past the balcony. It was a city survey drone, round and white, with the Canvas Forest City logo on its side. Normally they mapped streets. But this one was broadcasting a crackling emergency alert from a small speaker on its underside.

*"All districts report color reduction. Repeat — all districts. Source unknown. Estimated full greyscale in four hours."*

Buck stared at the drone until it buzzed out of sight.

Four hours.

He looked out at the city. The yellow shop windows were pale now. The orange birds sat silently on rooftops, their feathers almost cream-colored.

"Buck," Maple said quietly.

"I see it."