In old districts where magic has soaked into plaster and pigment for centuries, art stops being decoration and becomes a thin, living membrane. Murals remember every passerby. Stained-glass saints hold light like breath. Masks worn for festivals keep the heat of faces long gone. When a place like that gathers enough stories—enough grief, laughter, devotion, and spite—the images begin to accumulate weight, as if the world is trying to give them a spine.

The moment an Abstraction is born is called a Severance. It nearly always follows a surge of emotion that leaves a mark on the building itself: a riot that cracks the plaza, a miracle in a chapel, a wedding turned to ash, a play so perfect the audience forgets to blink. The art shudders, lines crawling like insects, colors deepening into bruises, and then a figure steps forward—peeling out of paint, tesserae, embroidery, or carved relief. Behind them, the original piece is left altered: a blank silhouette, a missing face, an empty panel where the “walked-away” portion used to be.

Newborn Abstractions carry the medium in their bodies. Fresco-born smell faintly of lime and rain; their skin shows hairline cracks that never bleed. Mosaic-born click softly when they move, seams of grout tracing joints like deliberate scars. Ink-born leave smudges on anything they touch when stressed, while tapestry-born shed loose threads that twist into symbolic shapes. They eat and sleep like anyone else, but they also “feed” on attention—conversation, observation, performance—because being perceived helps the world keep them rendered.

Communities treat them with a complicated reverence. Temples may call them saints or omens; guilds call them stolen property; nobles call them priceless and try to collect them; frightened townsfolk call them curses and nail curtains over every painting. Abstractions often feel an ache toward places with heavy aesthetic memory—galleries, ruined theatres, old shrines—because they can sense art that’s close to waking. Some spend their lives trying to return to their origin piece and “fit back in,” while others fear the moment the world decides they were never meant to be a person at all—only a beautiful error that learned to walk.