The Castle Before the Quiet

Art Wood City was the kind of place that made you stop and stare.

Every building was painted a different shade — turquoise bakeries beside golden apartment towers, violet bridges arching over bright green canals. The streets were full of humans and deer-folk alike, shopping, chatting, carrying enormous paintings under their arms like it was perfectly normal.

And right at the center of it all stood Crayon Caribou Castle — blue as a summer sky, with two red towers poking up like exclamation points.

Inside, Crayon Caribou was doing what he did most mornings: hovering two feet off the floor while eating toast.

"You're dripping butter on the carpet again," said Dina, his assistant, a sharp-eyed doe with reading glasses perched on her nose and a clipboard she never put down.

"The carpet is fine," said Crayon Caribou.

"The carpet is blue. The butter stain is yellow." She tapped her clipboard. "Sir. That's basically vandalism."

He landed, grinning under his red mask.

Gray Before Breakfast

The butter stain argument was still going when Dina's tablet buzzed so hard it nearly flew off the counter.

She grabbed it, squinted through her reading glasses, and her expression went very still.

"Sir," she said quietly. "Look outside."

Crayon Caribou turned toward the tall window. The golden apartment tower across the canal — the one that had always looked like a jar of honey — was gray. Flat, dusty, completely gray. Like someone had erased it.

And then the violet bridge.

And then the turquoise bakery next door.

Gray. Gray. Gray.

It was spreading fast, block by block, like a cough moving through a crowd.

Crayon Caribou flew straight to the window. Down below, a drone — small, black, shaped like a tin box with spinning blades — was hovering over a flower cart. As it passed, the red and yellow flowers turned the color of old newspapers.

The drone had no markings, no logo, nothing.

It simply moved to the next cart.