Stories
The stairs spiraled upward like a question Mara could never answer. One hundred and forty-seven steps, worn smooth by decades of footfalls—hers now, her brother’s before, their father’s before that. Each evening she climbed them, hand trailing the iron rail, gulls crying their accusations beyond the salt-streaked windows. The wind pressed against the tower’s stones, a sound like breathing, like the sea itself had lungs.
The cold, metallic air smells of ozone and rust, a scent that has been the constant companion of my thirty years aboard the Argo. I call this vessel a ship, but it is just a drifting tomb now, a colossal, dying sphere of metal suspended in the void. My entire life is measured by the silence of its failing systems and the slow, agonizing count to this single, crucial moment.
Elara was a cartographer, but not of lands you could see. Her maps were woven from starlight and the whispers of ancient glaciers. One night, while charting the silence between constellations, she noticed a tear in the sky, a shimmering fissure that bled a faint, silver light. It was a route, a path to somewhere else entirely.