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The city of Lyrasea breathed with the tide.
At dawn, the kelp platforms lifted, long emerald fronds tightening and buoying the homes, bridges, and towers as if the city were a single organism stretching awake. By night, the lagoon dimmed to a velvet hush, bioluminescent algae waking in soft blues and greens, tracing every canal and ladder rung with cold fire. The air always smelled of salt and living leaf—green, iron-bright, and faintly sweet—and when the wind slipped between the kelp ribs, it sang.
The soil was red enough to stain the light.
When the Hesperus broke orbit and slid into the atmosphere, the planet’s surface bloomed beneath the heat shimmer like an exposed heart—crimson plains veined with rivers of darker rust, studded with forests that glowed softly even under the noon glare. The light was not reflected. It was breathed.
The city remembered everything, even when its people did not.
From the twenty-third floor of the Saffron Spire, Mara Vale watched data towers pierce the smog like obsidian needles. Their surfaces shimmered with scrolling light—petabytes breathing in steady rhythms. Below, the streets pulsed with traffic and neon, and above, the cloud held what mattered most: fragments of human lives, clipped and tagged and sold.