Stories
The ring glowed like a halo around Earth, a silver ribbon laced with blue light. Inside its vast, circulating corridors stretched shelves of photons — the Archive of All Thought, humanity’s orbital library. Every word ever written shimmered within walls of solid light, each volume weightless, touchable only through intention. People sometimes called it the “last mind of humanity.” To me, it was home.
The rain hammered the glass towers of New Avalon like a thousand tiny fists, each drop echoing against the endless lattice of holographic billboards that flickered with crimson warnings: “WATER CONTAMINATED – DO NOT DRINK.” The city’s arteries—its massive, interwoven water mains—glowed faintly beneath the streets, a network of veins pulsing with a liquid that had once been the lifeblood of billions. Now it carried something else.
The basalt palace of Ignis-Rahl did not sit upon the volcano; it was carved into its very throat. Outside, the world was a jagged wasteland of obsidian, but inside the Throne of Embers, the air was a thick, grey soup. Ash drifted from the ceiling like cursed snow, coating the velvet tapestries and the lungs of the few who remained.