The air inside the dome hissed like a wounded animal, a sound that made Lieutenant Mara Voss press her palms against the reinforced glass. Outside, the twin suns of Altair-9 cast jagged shadows across the rust-colored plains, their light bleeding…
## The Bloomkeepers The dust tasted like regret. Amelia spat, a gritty film coating her tongue. Around her, the sprawling expanse of what used to be Kansas shimmered under a merciless sun. Cracked earth stretched toward a bleached horizon, fractured…
## Whispers of Stone Dust devils danced across the cracked earth, mocking Elias’s efforts to coax a single stalk of corn from the parched soil. The Nebraska sun beat down, relentless, turning the air thick and heavy as a wool…
## The Cartographer’s Bloom The desert wind tasted of grit and sun-baked stone, a familiar sting against my lips. I squinted at the shimmering horizon, dust devils dancing like restless spirits across the ochre expanse. This wasn’t just any desert;…
## The Lumina Weaver The salt spray stung Elara’s face as she wrestled with the submersible’s hatch. Gears groaned, a rusty protest against her persistent tugging. Beneath the churning turquoise of the Azure Sea lay more than just coral reefs…
## The Obsidian Bloom The tremor started low, a growl beneath the cobblestones. Then it surged, throwing me against the mosaic floor of our atrium. Marble rained down, shattering against the peristyle. My mother screamed, pulling my younger brother, Titus,…
## The Static Between The salt spray tasted like regret on Old Man Hemlock’s lips. He adjusted the focusing lens of the fresnel, the beam slicing through the November gloom like a hot knife. Three decades at North Sentinel Rock…
The rain smelled of salt and something else—rotting kelp, maybe, clinging to the stone walls. Twilight bled across Haven’s harbor, a bruised purple and grey where the jagged cliffs met the restless sea. It wasn’t a pretty harbor, not anymore.…