PRISMATIC

Emotions don't belong to you in the Quadra Empire. They are crystallized by your Socket — the device bolted to every citizen's chest — measured, taxed, and regulated. Yellow Crystals mean happiness, and happiness is the only emotion the Empire considers acceptable. Every other color — the blue of grief, the silver of pain, the red of rage, the murky green of wandering thought — is classified as socially destabilizing waste. You pay to have it removed. The wealthy produce Yellow easily. The poor produce everything else, and spend their wages disposing of it. Ian has never produced Yellow. He is eighteen, an orphan, a mine worker in District Seven, digging the iron that goes into other people's Sockets. He has never tried to generate a crystal on purpose. There's no point. Whatever comes out will only cost him more than he has. Then he sees Sera. She is the village shrine maiden — low-born, quietly strange, dancing a memorial rite for the dead at the mine entrance like something out of a world that no longer exists. For just a moment, her eyes find his. That night, Ian walks into a private Crystal Generation Center for the first time. What comes out isn't Yellow. It isn't any single color at all. Five colors. All at once. A Prismatic Crystal. The Bureau comes for him immediately. Ian is reassigned to Crystal Valley — the wasteland where the Empire sends everything it wants to forget. There, among mountains of discarded emotions, he meets Rusty: a fugitive inventor who once helped build the Socket system, now living in hiding with a massive automaton assembled from scrap metal and salvaged parts. The automaton has no emotions. No memories. No color of its own. Rusty calls it the Colorless Colossus. And when Ian's Prismatic Crystal is placed into its chest — it wakes up. Rusty has a theory. If Ian can keep generating Prismatic Crystals — and if the legend of the Solar Crystal is real — the Colossus could become something the Empire has never encountered: a being that thinks like a human, but is bound by none of humanity's limits. To get there, they will need the Five Primordial Dragons — ancient creatures the Empire has spent generations capturing, exploiting, and erasing from history. The dragons are running out of time. So is the world.