Outside of the Wall -- Prologue

The prologue to a dystopian YA novel called "Outside of the Wall." Originally written as a part of the AutoCrit Short Story Challenge.

The day the fog came, Milo L’Gerice woke before the sun.

He lay in bed with his hands folded on his chest, staring at the ceiling’s ornate gold-leaf latticework. The patterns were too familiar now. He’d counted each swirl, each delicate loop. Sixty-three, if he was generous with what counted as separate. He didn’t sleep much anymore. Not from nightmares, or insomnia, or stress—but from a deeper kind of restlessness, like his soul was turning over in its sleep and he had to keep watch until it settled.

Tomorrow would be his cotillion. The L’Gerice Maturation Ceremony. His last day as a child, his first as a legacy. The same speeches, the same rituals, the same glass-eyed guests who’d kissed his forehead at birth and offered condolences at his mother’s funeral. It would all come full circle now. Sixteen. The magical number when The Order had decreed was time for a boy to be pinned in gold, polished in public, and offered up to the city like a perfectly ripe fruit.

He hated it.

The robe was already hanging in the corner, navy velvet and gold trim heavier than chainmail. It had belonged to his father, and his grandfather before him, and his great grandfather before him. And now, it was his burden to bear. When Milo had tried it on the day before, the hem had brushed the tops of his boots, and the collar had stiffened against his neck like it wanted to choke him.

The garment still smelled faintly of cedar and incense from ceremonial storage, and dust settled in the sleeves like it had been waiting for a better heir. He’d stared at it for too long after the attendants left, wondering if his father had experienced the same tightening in his throat when he wore it. Did the legacy feel any lighter back then?

He sat up slowly, listening to the house. The staff moved like ghosts. The manor was always quiet this time of day, but this was something different. No soft conversation in the kitchen, no broom swish against the back hall tiles. Only the occasional creak of wood cooling in the walls.

Rotmertholm Castle loomed like a memory made stone. Long wings of corridors stretched out like ribs from the main hall, echoing footsteps even when no one walked them. The walls were paneled in carved blackwood, polished smooth with generations of oil and handprints, and everywhere, the scent of age: iron from the sconces, damp from the stone, and the faint musk of forgotten books no fire could quite mask.

As he moved past portraits of ancestors—stoic men and sun-eyed women—all of them watching, their painted eyes glossy with pride or disappointment. Most days, he couldn’t tell which. The Grand Stair still groaned at its fourth step. The eastern gallery still smelled like lemon balm from the herb garden below. Everything familiar. Everything suffocating.

Outside his window, the city still slept. The horizon—usually tinged with the usual acidic yellow of The Cloud—was pale gray. Not lighter. Not darker. Just muted, like someone had scrubbed all the color from the morning.

He rose and dressed himself. No help from servants. No fancy robe. Just his usual soft linen shirt, dark slacks, worn boots, and the navy coat with the gold buttons. The one he liked because it made him feel like himself and not his bloodline. He fastened the buttons slowly, one by one. Each click into place steadied him. Anchored him.

He paused briefly at Adeline’s door. She’d been fussing over her hair for weeks in preparation for his cotillion. She’d whispered to him the night before that she planned to wear the same perfume their mother wore. “Maybe it will make them see her in me,” she’d said. “Maybe that will soften them.”

She didn’t understand. He didn’t want the crowd softened. He wanted them to look. To see the truth of what he was becoming. Not a prince. Not a leader. Just Milo.

He left quietly, slipping down the side stairwell and out the eastern entrance. The guards would note it in their logs he was sure, but they wouldn’t stop him. No one stopped Milo L’Gerice. Their inaction was part of the problem.

The first thing he noticed was the sky. It had gone flat, colorless, and silent, as if the world itself had been paused. Usually, even in the dimmed light of The Cloud, the kingdom pulsed with movement. But today, there was no rhythm. The air didn’t carry sound the same way. Everything sounded muffled, like he’d stepped inside a giant lung right before it inhaled, but also like the world had forgotten to breathe. He felt like he was trapped in a void, the kind that makes your bones hum.

The castle gates loomed behind him, towering iron wrought into curls and crests, flanked by watchtowers where the guards now stood still as statues. Past the gates, Rotmertholm unfolded like a broken crown. The streets were oddly still.

It wasn’t that people weren’t awake yet—it was that they hadn’t stepped outside. Shop windows were shuttered. Curtains drawn. A hush hung over Rotmertholm like a prayer half-whispered and forgotten mid-sentence. The usual morning sounds—vendors shouting, horses clattering, mothers scolding children—were absent. Even the birds hadn’t yet stirred.

It was the fault of the fog, like everything always was. The whole kingdom could feel it coming; they just didn't know what it wanted from them.

He moved through the winding heart of the city, past rooftops tiled in cracked green slate and half-crumbled statues of old gods who had long stopped answering any of their prayers. The kingdom had once been beautiful. He could tell in the way even the broken parts still held their shape, how the cobblestones retained the curve of decades of carriage wheels, how each storefront had a carved lintel or gold-leaf trim, even if it flaked now like dried paint.

Rotmertholm had once been a jewel, they said. The city of seven spires, its banners known across the continent. Now the spires were dark and unlit, and the banners had long since frayed in the wind, bleached pale by the clouded sun.

Milo walked with his hands tucked into his coat pockets. The morning was cool, not cold, but the kind of chill that clung to skin long after it had passed, like the memory of a touch. He passed familiar buildings: the spice shop where he used to sneak clove candies, the old schoolhouse with its chipped lintel and crooked bell, the tailor’s storefront where his mother had once stood him on a crate and called him her little emperor.

Everything looked the same. And yet, different. Wrong, somehow. Soot crusted the rooftops. Algae crept up the marble facades. Once-polished shop signs swung on rusted chains. Color had fled. Even laughter sounded like a foreign tongue.

The fog hadn't rolled in like a storm. It had crept in like guilt. First, the skies dimmed and a permanent haze stained the air, filtering sunlight down into a sickly yellow wash. Then came the sickness, the hunger. And today, finally, the fog itself.

The fog was waiting for him.

He didn’t see it all at once. It wasn’t a wall or a sudden bank. It was more like noticing something missing. A distance that should have been visible—the hills beyond the city, the far towers of the sunken aqueduct—but were no longer there. Like someone had erased them. The horizon had folded in on itself.

He saw it before he reached the garden paths—only a smear at first, like wet paint bleeding across the horizon. The fog knew no urgency, but still moved with certainty. In its wake, color bled out of rooftops and windows. Sound dulled. Even the scent of the morning—the bread ovens, the smoke, the iron tang of the city—evaporating. In the presence of the fog, the world became less. As Milo neared the outer edge of the city, the haze grew denser. Not rolling in, not moving at all, in fact. Just there. Still. Present.

He didn’t stop.

The outer gardens, built along the inside curve of the barbed wall, were patchy with frost-killed greens and thin stalks. The city tried to pretend they were functional. That the food grown here supplemented the supply chain, that it mattered. But the truth was, these plants were tokens. Promises. Symbols that they were still capable of sustaining themselves, even if only in theory.

Milo knelt near one of the oldest plots—his and Adeline’s. Back when they were kids, they’d planted peas here. They never grew properly, not even before the fog made growing healthy vegetables nigh but impossible. But the destructive nature of their new normal hadn’t stopped them from pretending. He traced a finger across the copper plant marker still half-buried in dirt: “Milo’s peas. Hands off.”

Then, it had been a joke. Now the tag could be a gravestone.

He sat for a while, his legs folded beneath him, hands resting on his knees. The fog pressed against the other side of the wall like water behind glass. The barbed coils of the wall didn’t seem to keep the gloom of the mist out of the realm so much as ask it not to enter.

And, for the moment, the fog listened.

Milo heard nothing. Not wind. Not birds. Not even his own heartbeat. The fog had created a vacuum, not of air, but of meaning. As if sound had forgotten how to be sound. But he wasn't afraid. He didn’t feel much of anything, which was the strange part. His heart wasn’t racing. His breath was calm. There was only a quiet sense of gravity, like he was standing on the edge of something massive. Not a cliff, necessarily. But something vast. Something unknowable.

He stood and walked closer to the wall.

Everyone had their theories. Some said the fog was what was left of the gods’ disappointment. Others believed it was made by the people who lived beyond—a toxin to keep them out, to poison and punish. Others still whispered there were no people left beyond the wall. That the fog was all that remained. The more superstitious folk said the fog wasn’t killing anyone at all. That it was transforming them. Or calling them home. That those who disappeared didn’t die—they walked into something else. Something better. Or worse.

No one agreed on what the fog did. But everyone agreed on one thing: it chose.

The Order, of course, had its own doctrine. The fog was nature's reckoning. A call to purity. A signal to remain within sanctioned bounds.

But Milo didn’t believe in doctrine. He believed in what he saw. And what he saw now was something new.

Shapes. Outlines, barely visible. A darker smear in the pale. A figure?

He blinked, stepped closer. The coils of the fence buzzed faintly. It wasn’t wind. There was no wind.

The figure didn’t move. It just stood there. Not menacing. Not welcoming.

Waiting.

“Hello?” Milo’s voice came out steadier than he expected. The sound of it dropped like a stone into a bottomless well. No echo. No bounce.

The figure was still.

He reached out instinctively, pressing his palm to the metal fence. It was warmer than he thought it would be.

Something shifted in the fog. Not parted. Not blown away: thinned. Like a veil briefly lifted.

And for a brief moment, he saw something he never thought he'd see for himself.

A field. Grassy. Green, impossibly green, like emeralds glinting in morning dew. And above it, the unobstructed sky—vivid blue, streaked with soft clouds like cream in tea. The air beyond the fog looked alive. The world looked alive. He could almost hear something, too—birdsong, maybe. Or water babbling in a nearby brook Milo didn't remember even existed.

But the way the sky looked stood out to him the most, the beauty winding him like a blow to the chest. The sun was real there, not filtered through yellow haze, but golden and warm. There was nothing obstructing his view. No acid tint. Just pure, aching blue. The kind of sky he’d only ever seen in oil paintings and crumbling storybooks. He could smell something, too. Not rot, not ash, the smells of the kingdom in its current state he'd become accustomed to. Wildflowers.

He forgot to breathe.

And then, just as quickly, it was gone.

The figure disappeared with the sky.

The fog pressed back into itself.

He stumbled a half step back, blinking. His hand still on the fence. A faint sheen on his palm, like dew, or maybe something else. It didn’t burn; it tingled.

He stood there for a long time, staring at the place where the figure had been. He didn’t understand what he had seen. He didn’t think it was dangerous.

He didn’t realize no one would ever see him alive again.

---

They found him that afternoon.

Face-down in the garden. Arm outstretched toward the fence. The copper marker bent beneath him. His coat was clean. No blood. No wounds. Just a faint sheen on his skin. Like frost. Or starlight.

The official story was carefully written. Milo had wandered too close to the wall. A guard, frightened by a silhouette in the fog, fired preemptively. A tragedy. A mistake.

But the autopsy was inconclusive. His body hadn't suffered; there were no signs of trauma. They received no real explanation at all.

Some whispered he had been marked. That the fog had touched him, not to kill, but to claim. Others said he had never died at all. That he had crossed over, wherever that meant.

Adeline wasn’t told that part. No one was. They sealed the report. Buried the truth with the body.

The cotillion was canceled. The robe went back into storage. The garden was shuttered. The fog stayed where it was—just outside the wall. Watching.

Waiting.

And Adeline, though still a child, knew one thing for certain: Milo hadn’t run. He hadn’t rebelled. He hadn’t meant to disappear.

He had gone for a walk, the kind he always took when the world felt too small. And maybe, just maybe, this time, the fog had listened.

She sat by their shared garden plot, fingers buried in the dirt where his peas once failed to grow, trying to remember the sound of his laugh. The way he always looked toward the sky like it owed him an answer, or an apology. The way he was the only person she knew who never flinched at the fog—not out of foolishness, but because something in him had already accepted its presence as a part of his life.

Adeline would whisper his name into the mist, again and again, just in case he could still hear her. Just in case he wasn't gone. Just in case, one day, he might answer.

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What do you think happened to Milo? What caused this mysterious fog, and how might it be stopped? Leave your theories in the comments—I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Next week, I’ll be sharing a (very delayed) look at the WriterMBA / HeartieCon adventure I went on in NOLA back in March. If you’re not already, I hope you’ll consider becoming a subscriber—free or paid—and stick around!