Writetober 2025, Coven of the Quill, Day 8: The Palette of Memory
The studio was cold, not from the autumn air, but from the absence of desire. Elias Thorn, a fine seventy-eight, sat on a stool before a canvas as blank and white as the back of his mind. He still remembered the feel of the brush—the sharp, satisfying weight of the sable hair in his hand—but the colors were beginning to flee.
First, it was the nuances. The subtle shift from a deep lavender to a fading indigo in a twilight sky. Then, the whole families of hues departed. The greens had gone last spring, leaving the world a vibrant, beautiful study in beige and black. Now, even the primary colors were fading, leaching out like spilled watercolor on newsprint. He saw only a muddy, indistinct gloom. The doctor called it an aggressive form of macular degeneration. Elias called it the curtain call.
He knew what he had to do. Fame and money were irrelevant; his reputation was secure, and his needs were few. All he wanted was to keep the vision that had been his whole life.
He placed an advertisement in a local occult periodical: Willing to barter soul for an exclusive and unique service. Specialist in memory retention preferred.
The demon did not arrive in a plume of smoke. It arrived as a smooth, well-dressed man in a suit of impossible charcoal. It sat opposite Elias at the mahogany table, hardly taking the offered coffee.
"A unique request, Mr. Thorn," it said, its voice a low note. "Most request longevity, or the Midas touch. You ask only for perfect, eternal recollection of all visual input you have ever received."
Elias, whose world was now a soup of gray and brown, nodded. "To see, truly see, the colors I have already painted. To feel the texture of light on a woman's cheek, the specific shade of verdigris rust on a Florentine roof tile, and the way a certain orange-yellow sunset hit the canvas that one time in '72. I want it all."
The demon steepled its fingers. "And the cost, which I am obliged to inform you, is your soul; do you accept?"
"Excellent. Now for the caveat." The demon smiled, and it was a terrible, beautiful thing—like a crack appearing in fine porcelain. "The terms are simple: I shall grant your desire. You will retain perfect recall of every visual memory. Every light, every shadow, every color and texture, forever etched in your mind. But you will never be able to create again. Not a single stroke. Your hands will refuse the brush, and your vision will reject the canvas. Your gift will become your prison."
Elias leaned back, the last light of the evening catching the fading irises of his eyes. "I accept."
The memory of creating was already a dull ache. The agony of knowing he could never create again was only the final nail in the coffin of his artistic life. It was a fair trade. His art was not in his hands anymore; it was in his mind.
The demon reached across the table. It did not touch Elias. Instead, it pressed a single, translucent finger directly against Elias's temple.
There was no pain, only a shattering sensation of completion. It felt like a lifetime of tangled threads suddenly snapping taut.
The demon stood up, straightening the creases in its charcoal suit. "Enjoy the view, Mr. Thorn. It is magnificent, isn't it?" And with a flicker, it was gone.
Elias sat motionless. He could still see the room, but behind his fading vision, his mind was a supernova.
Instantly, he was surrounded by light.
He saw the cobalt blue of his mother's dress on his fifth birthday. The precise, grainy yellow of the sunflower he painted when he was nine. He could feel, not just see, the thick, ridged texture of the plaster walls in his first tiny apartment in Paris, lit by a single, dirty tungsten bulb that cast a shade of orange he'd spent forty years trying to recreate. He saw the shimmering, impossible, metallic green of a hummingbird's throat, the exact shade of rust that bled from the head of a nail, and the deep violet of a cloud just before a storm broke.
He opened his eyes. The physical room was still a blur, but the memory of the room—the crisp, dark-wood grain of the table, the chipped silver of the paint palette hanging on the wall, the exact dust-mote dance in the afternoon sun of a Thursday a decade ago—was blindingly real.
Elias rose slowly. He walked to the storage closet, found a clean canvas, and set it on the easel. He picked up his finest brush, dipping it into a jar of turpentine.
It was not a physical paralysis. It was a complete absence of will. His fingers refused to clench. The muscles of his arm went slack. The perfect, crystalline images in his mind—the infinite library of all beautiful sights—shouted for release, but the message did not reach his hand.
Elias Thorn, the renowned artist, stared at the blank canvas. He would never again suffer the frustration of an imperfect line or a wrong color. He would never again experience the intoxicating joy of a piece successfully finished.
He placed the brush back on the table, his hand trembling slightly, and then stopped. He didn't need it.
He sat back down, letting the blur of the studio fade. He closed his eyes and summoned the most beautiful sight he had ever created: a portrait of his late wife, illuminated by the pink-gold light of a winter sunrise. Every strand of hair, every minute wrinkle of age and laughter—it was all there, perfect, magnificent, and entirely his own.
He spent the rest of his twilight years in that chair, his eyes mostly closed, watching the most spectacular gallery the world had ever known, all housed behind his eyelids. He was a museum of one, a man who had traded the painful hope of tomorrow's creation for the perfect, melancholic preservation of yesterday's light.
This short story was written by @zoehcomedy as a part of our 2025 flagship collection, Writetober. You can read this story and more like it on thewritetoberproject.com.
