The Scepter: 1) Cliff & 2) Fall

I took a break from the horrors of reality these last few months.

Frustrated and tired, I turned inward and found an outline I wrote decades ago, floating in my head.

I desire childish simplicity now, so I'm writing a childish story with shallow characters, a simple plot, and little self-editing. The story is set tens of thousands of years in the future and scratches a nostalgic itch for those mildewed pulp sci-fi books I found in an empty house. Saccharin, easy to consume, far-off adventures that took me away from the cold. I need that now. A story that is divorced from this reality.

A courteous warning: this chronicle treads among blood, captivity, and youthful rites. Reader, proceed if your constitution permits.

1 Cliff

There is a trick to not thinking about the drop.

Dyoakra, son of Faftra the Agrucer of Diltpur in Brasowa on Oif around Asdra, keeps his gaze on the rock’s skin—pebbled violet, slick with mist—and on the egg nestled in its shallow cup. Asdral’s light makes the shell sweat. The cliff makes his hands do the same. He breathes through his teeth and lets the harness bite his hips.

“Left toe, thumb, twist,” he whispers, the way his mother taught him. The hook sinks, the line listens, and the wind claws at his back as if the sky wants him more than Oif ever did.

The second egg comes away reluctantly, a wet pop of membrane breaking. They’re clutches, not treasures; he tells himself that. The dragons’ brood will be large enough. The dragons will not notice two gone.

A shadow folds over him. Instinct twitches his weight the wrong way—his boot skates, the rope skitters, and the harness snaps taut, tearing a grunt out of him. He locks elbows, forehead to stone. The climbing suit’s micro‑pigments surge; violet and salt‑black crawl across him to match the cliff as the beast flies past. Camouflage is honest only if he’s still. If he moves, the vesparsaur will see him.

It sweeps past—a ribbon of bone and sail—wind clawing, brine and copper in his mouth. He does not breathe. The talons scissor empty air and are gone.

It wheels. Comes back. His calves tremble, his fingers sing with the ache of holding. He lets the pain exist and not travel. The dragon’s shadow slides off him, and only then does he let breath back in a thread.

Dyoakra laughs once, sharp and shaky, and stows the egg in the padded satchel.

When he pulls himself up over the lip, his arms betray him and he sprawls on the grit in a slow, stupid collapse, satchel clutched to his chest. Above the cliff, the world is ordinary again: a sky striped with turbines, the distant taller line of the Ecorium, and the blue loam of Brasowa fading into the rust of plowland. Envirmechs tick by in rows, lifting soil, tasting it, humming their scores.

He lies there and lets his pulse taper.

“Dyoa!” His little sister’s high call carries from the path. His mother’s voice finds him. “Bring them quick, the reshtalla needs folding time!”

He rises, grinning because bravery feels best when it has a witness.

He hands the eggs to his mother, sweeps his sister into his arms, and places her on his shoulders. They walk along the levee, where the wind breaks low and warm. Telilu slides off his back and begins skipping at his heel.

They walk through the entrance barrier, and the hygiene‑mist arch sighs, cleaning and perfuming the air as they pass. Rosemary and thistleberry for his mother, sweetreed for Telilu, and fithergrass for him.

Fithergrass is Seilhar’s favorite scent.

The healer panel blinks green for everyone; the blisters on his hands are gone. He had set it to smooth his calluses after Seilhar complained his hands were too rough.

His mother examines the eggs without praise or rebuke, just that quick glance that checks his soul as much as the shells. “I saw the tremor. I saw your smile.” Her hands are already elsewhere—testing flour’s temper, calling for the sweet oil, flicking the pot’s handle thin so the reshtalla will sheet like light. “Don’t hide your fear and your pride—take them to the chapel,” she adds. Then, with the false pretense of dismissing him, “Tell your father to come home and clean before you transport. We’ll see you at the booth. And don’t dawdle; joy goes stale when you hoard it.”

Dyoakra knows she is not done, so he sits.

She pauses, thumb on a measure, as though she just remembered what she was always planning to say. “Elrihan was by. He’d heard talk.” The word talk lands heavier than the scoop. “He sounded serious. Said perhaps Seilhar shouldn’t visit this time.”

Dyoakra’s throat tightens harder than it did under the vesparsaur’s wing.

“Everyone knows you’re diligent, helpful—that’s why you were even considered,” she says, soft but firm. “Don’t give him reason. Elrihan will disapprove if the rumors persist. Open fully in Communion, let the heat out, all of it.” She presses a ring into his palm—yellow, warm from her skin.

“Not fair,” Telilu mutters, lips pushed out. “You’re always leaving. You don’t even work with Papa anymore. You go under the Ecorium, and then you go to her.”

He scoops her up before the sulk can deepen. She squeals, clutching at his neck, and he carries her to the sleeping alcove. The mat wakes to her weight and reshapes to cup her, working hard as she wriggles, and he tickles her to make it work harder.

“You’re never here,” she insists once the laughter ebbs. “You go under the Ecorium every day.”

“So the pipes don’t sulk,” he says, and digs his fingers into her ribs. She shrieks, half-laughing, half-protesting, kicking at the air.

“And every other Frondday you don’t even sleep here,” she gasps between giggles, triumphant. “I wish you never met her.”

The play breaks. He smooths her hair back. “That hurt,” he says quietly. “I have to work under the Ecorium.”

“You do it for Seilhar.”

“I do,” he admits, voice gentler. “And soon I’ll be back working with Father again. You’ll like her if you talk to her. Eight days from now, she sleeps here again—please try. We’ll play games. She tells stories better than I do.”

He feeds twine into the toy-lattice while he talks; it chirrs and prints a miniature vesparsaur. “One of these almost got me this morning,” he says, setting it on her belly. Admiration wipes away the pout. She makes the toy roar, eyes wide. “It eats you,” she declares, and sticks out her tongue.

He laughs, stepping back as she begins to give the toy its own story, letting her world fill the room again.

He steps into the privacy nook. The swarm lifts salt and dust from his skin; he pulls on tunic and hose, checks and fastens his belt, and comes back out to find Telilu making the toy chase a pillow. He shrugs into his robe, taps her ankle as he passes, and heads for the door.

At the entrance, he almost collides with his father, shoulders dusty, hair salted with irrigation spray. “Chapel,” Dyoakra says, gesturing to his mother with a grin. His father snorts, ducks the mist, comes out smelling like mint and rain, and ruffles Dyoakra’s quills by reflex. “Meet you at the booth,” his father says, and makes a face that means, Don’t spend all your virtue on sweet drink. He lowers his voice as he passes, “And keep clear of… trouble this time.”

Dyoakra steps into the yard, lifts his arms to the sky, and recites the prayer of transit the way he learned it. He names himself and the Chapel, and a small metal bird knifes out of the air, brakes to a humming hover, and he feels weightless as his feet drift from Oif’s surface. A clear crystal grows from the bird and surrounds him. The ring on his finger is now slightly rusty, a yellow‑orange. The ground below rushes away.

For almost five kiloseconds, he rides above crystal‑domed fields and cottage roofs and the green ribbon of the canal, the world streaking by. He sees the fabrication spine’s smoke thread thin and sure; the turbine rows flicker like comb teeth. Far off, the Brasowa Ecorium glitters, housing the Factor and his staff in jewels and gardens.

The sphere slows without scolding and lowers him to the chapel steps. He holds his hand before the door—and the ring deepens to a richer orange as the door recognizes his share of virtue.

He hates the chair but sits. The chapel’s Holy Organ hums, clean as a tuned blade. He lets it find his breath, then his pulse, then the skin of his memories. The link opens, and he is in Communion with the humanity around Asdral. Ten, twenty, a hundred threads touch his fear and his stupid pride and pass them hand to hand until they are not heavy at all, just warm.

He keeps Seilhar from his mind with practiced fortitude. He knows it is a sin, but he jealously holds those thoughts and feelings for himself.

The moment of fear he felt thrills a miner living on the rocky edges of the system, who has never felt the pull of gravity over such depths nor seen beasts so large. A milliner on Sramus takes some of his pride to remind her that human bravery happens every day; she need not be afraid.

When it is over, he takes a moment to remember who he is; a chapel maiden brings him water and a towel to wipe his tears. After a couple of kiloseconds, he leaves the chapel, and the day is taller.

By noon, the plaza smells like sugar, smoke, and hot oils. Faftra’s stall is already mobbed—everyone knows that his wife folds reshtalla so thin you can read a blessing through it. Dyoakra threads the crowd with a post‑chapel lightness and a private errand: a gift for Seilhar.

They were matched when she was four hegakons and he five, a bureaucratic procedure that became his only desire. The Bundling had begun only recently, with the start of Seilhar’s fifth hegakon: once each mekon they traded nights between families, sealed in tarry skins—first a layer applied by their own kin, then a second secured by future in‑laws.

Seilhar’s father, Elrihan the Numerator, had once complained that Dyoakra’s mother made the tarry skins too thin. Since then, she crafted them so sheer that Dyoakra felt shame when Seilhar’s mother saw him enter the bedroom—and thrill when Seilhar blushed at the sight of him.

Despite her father’s doubts, two nights ago Seilhar’s tarry skin had been only a few hundred micrometers thin—opaque, yet elastic and tracing her almost perfectly. Her mother was signaling that the Bedding Ceremony would be soon, and Dyoakra’s anticipation had become a fever the healer panel could not cure.

Courtship was joy by design, torment by doctrine. Conciliator Nemsash preached that longing breeds love, love breeds family, family breeds productivity. His father called it joyous torment with a grin he couldn’t help, swearing that his greatest pains and pleasures arrived wearing his wife’s face and sounding like his children’s voices. He had once pulled Dyoakra aside—more bashful than when he faced a broken pump only to realize the deactivation code was set—to explain that a man should find privacy to ease pressure before a bundling; and, more bashfully still, had told him to practice endurance so he would not shame himself when the bedding ceremony came.

Dyoakra passes painted combs and memory pins, thighbells and finger veils that taste the air and change color when you say a name. A merchant with a lacquered face sells scarves that drape like water and smell of synthetic fragrances, which feels like a lie. Another offers a cinch‑belt that hums in sympathy with your pulse and makes it louder; that feels like a worse truth.

Then he finds it: a shawl that sings.

It is a net of fine thread that shifts color when you breathe near it—rose into copper, copper into a shy blue—each change trailed by a breath of perfume that is not too smart for its own good: a heady blend of spice and salt and the snap of green, oils not factors. He lifts a corner, and it trills a note as if pleased to be touched. He imagines Seilhar in a white tarry skin so thin and well‑shaped that only her skin pattern would be hidden, wrapping herself in the shawl, pretending modesty and failing beautifully.

The merchant looks at his ring and looks past him.

Dyoakra lingers and examines the shawl more closely, earning the merchant’s ire.

“Not for you,” she says, bored, the way people are when they have done the arithmetic and see no profit in you.

“Not for me, for my bride,” Dyoakra retorts, polite because he’s been taught to be, stubborn because his mother is.

“The song,” she says. “The part that makes it worth wearing is too rich for the serf child who thinks himself a man.”

He slides his hand inside his robe and touches the second ring he keeps in a hidden pocket, cyan and shy as a secret he earned—odd jobs, diverted stipends, a wager he did not brag about. He brushes the ring to ring without letting anyone see. Color migrates; the chapel orange cools toward amber. He shows his hand for the merchant to notice. “Price it.”

They haggle. He never shows the second ring. He lets the yellow‑orange lighten by careful finger‑rubs, relaxing it back to warm shades when the merchant’s eyes narrow. The shawl sings a whisper like a held breath. Nearby, the plaza changes key as someone begins playing a brumhorn.

Finally, the merchant sighs and takes the pure yellow ring at last. She hands him the shawl with the practiced remorse that brings customers back to be fleeced again. He folds it along its seams so the weave won’t sulk, slips it into a hidden pocket his aunt stitched into his tunic, and pats it once as if to apologize for making it wait.

He begins to make his way back toward his family’s stall and almost makes it.

A surge moves through the square and banners rise from the esplanade; acrobats arc like spilled sparks. Children lift on toes to see the Stellarch—Teshallae Hectron—an office larger than any habitat. Even in plain robes, she has gravity: people lean toward her without noticing it.

Dyoakra stands on a water valve and sees her smile at something a child says. He thinks of the shawl folded against his chest and of Seilhar’s mouth when she pretends not to be happy. He thinks of the cliff’s edge, and the prayer of transit, and how every good thing requires you to trust your weight to something you cannot hold.

The future, too, is a kind of cliff.

2 Fall

The air changes. It’s not a sound, not at first; more like the plaza’s air forgot to stir. Then the alarms scream, and the crowd joins, and the banners don’t fall so much as choose a direction and commit.

Above the Ecorium’s shell, dark spots appear—presence, wrong, and immediate. They become shattered doors and then men: figures in black streaming on glittering cords, drop after drop as if poured from a crack in the sky. A lead‑grey commander rides the cord, visor shut, gestures neat as arithmetic.

The Stellarch’s guards in blue and green react; they’ve rehearsed this all their lives. Lines snap straight. Rifles speak in ritual volleys. Two teams peel and rake the drop zone with foam and flechette; another splices the crowd backward toward exits with practiced violence. A child sprints the wrong way, and a guard pivots, drives the child toward safety with a forearm and a curse that sounds like love.

It isn’t enough. The shadowed squads move with perfect control. Their weapons draw thin lines through the guard ranks and sew men closed. A net hisses down and takes a whole file at the knee. A shock baton kisses a blue‑green throat; the woman behind it goes quiet with her eyes still open, still angry.

Dyoakra spins toward the stall—sugar, smoke, and hot oil, and a queue that made sense a minute ago. The canvas has collapsed into itself, a tent trying to become a knot. Bowls skate. A pan flips and lands, singing on stone, then politely rolls into a sphere.

“Faftra!” he shouts, and his father’s name is pulled apart by noise. A glimpse: broad shoulders he used to ride, ducking under flying scrap, then gone behind a wall of people surging toward imagined safety.

Far off, the Ecorium’s gates detonate inward. The new air is heavier—metallic, copper, and cold. It travels across the plaza like floodwater; plants near the breach shiver, big fronds folding their mouths in reflex. Through the smoking gap strides the Glishelian host in ostentation: ranks of bright gold armor edged in white, plumes like little suns, blades that promise and keep. They cut as they walk. Serf, plebe, guard—everyone is the right kind of enemy for the first five hundred seconds.

A banner lifts behind them: a field of white, a black compass rose, and a name the crowd has been taught to dread—Stellarch Vlihet. People try to kneel and get trampled for it. People try to run and get shot for it.

Dyoakra doesn’t think. He runs where others run and ends up where he shouldn’t: pressed between a wall and a crush of bodies. The weight builds until it stops thinking about people. A shove ripples the mass; the pressure resolves into a single decision, then a shockwave—and blood.

The crowd’s front tears like paper. Those who can still move surge, then ricochet off their own fear and splinter in a dozen directions. Dyoakra is swept with them toward a seam where Glishelian beams unspool in clean white lines and open men five ranks deep.

The tide swings back. “Hulti!” an old man screams, louder than the ringing in Dyoakra’s ears—just before he and half the return flow begin bleeding from a constellation of invisible wounds and fold to the deck in jerks.

Dyoakra stumbles and falls. Others run and are rewarded by disciplined light.

He lies still. When the last sobs thin, he eases toward a break in the esplanade, rolls into a gap where tiles have levered, and drops through a broken joint into the service tram corridor that cleans the Ecorium’s lungs. The air down here tastes of rust and old soap. There are bodies: two guards in blue‑green who died in the position they were taught to die in; a plebeian boy with his hands still raised as if to catch something; a smear of oil pretending to be a shadow. Something bright lies among them. For a heartbeat, he thinks it’s a relic. It’s a dropped wand, ceremonial, its lights dying. He takes it anyway. Having a thing feels like having a choice.

Boots grate ahead. He folds himself into a service niche and lets the maintenance smell claim him.

Blue‑green at last—three guards, faces bright with sweat and dust. Between them walks Heritor Teshallae Acheal, the youngest of the stellarch's children and presumed heir, in an armored court jacket torn at one sleeve, hair perfect by habit and ruin. He clutches a rod no longer than a forearm; filigree crawls along it; ancient and hinting at myths that are real. Its harmonics climb into Dyoakra’s teeth.

“My Legatee,” one guard says, breathless as Acheael slows. “Our pursuers keep their pace,” she deferentially continues, “I await your will, Heritor.”

The man glances everywhere but where the danger is. “The lower ports,” he says. “We’ll take a tender. We will not be here when they count.”

They almost run into Dyoakra. The lead guard brings her weapon up, then stops with the muzzle a hand’s width from his nose. She recognizes the wand in his fist, the grease on his knuckles, the way he’s already half inside the vents.

“Serf,” she says. “Do you know this maze?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You’re conscripted,” she says without venom. “Guide. Now.”

They move.

Dyoakra sets a path because he can, because he’s done evacuation drills for vapors more dangerous than men. Under the humidification ribs, where air becomes human, through a power chase that smells like hot metal and his second home. Acheal hisses when his shoulder scrapes a strut. “Careful,” he says to the people keeping him alive.

A junction. Dyoakra palms the latch, pops a panel with the wand. The maintenance feed comes up as a string of horrifying sounds and worse images. He cycles cameras until the main esplanade burns into view: the blue‑green line broken into islands, the gold host moving as if on rails, and at the central dais, he pauses.

They’ve taken the Stellarch.

Teshallae Hectron kneels with her hands locked behind a barbed crown fused to her head, her robes torn away. Silver discs sit along her spine, up her arms, and across her chest. A Glishelian officer stands at her side, one hand holding a control orb, expression earnest, the way a bully looks when convincing themself they are right. Beside him stands Stellarch Shamar Vlihet in gold so bright it must be self‑illuminating, watching with polite attention, as if judging a performance for technique.

The officer speaks, and the mic can’t decide whether it's speech or screaming, but the meaning carries. Dyoakra nudges the gain.

“Please,” Hectron sobs when breath returns. She offers everything in a cascade that makes no sense at this distance—titles, corridors, a ledger of favors that took lifetimes to earn. “Please. End me. Please. I will serve you. I will kneel. Just—” The orb lifts; her body bows against its own structure. “The Wayfinder’s Scepter,” the officer says, patiently. “Where?”

“I gave it to my son,” she gasps, her voice all pain and shame. “To hide. Acheal, my light, my flesh—bring it. Bring it to Lord Vlihet. Please. Please. Please.”

In the duct, Acheal tightens on the rod until his knuckles flash. “Turn that off,” he says to no one and to Dyoakra, because Dyoakra’s hand is in the box. His face is a knife with two sides—panic and something that is not courage.

“We should find the guard captain,” Dyoakra says before he decides not to. The words are already in the air. “There’s still a line. If we can—”

“I am the guard captain,” Acheal snaps—then corrects himself without shame. “I am now the Stellarch. By principle, if not fact. That is my mother, and they will kill her whether we lose the Scepter or not. Turn it off.” He juts his chin at the rod. “This is my legacy and must be kept safe.”

“Sir,” the lead guard says, a plea hidden inside the word. “If we can rejoin—”

“We are leaving the Asdral System,” Acheal says, as if saying it makes it cheap enough to buy. “I may have lost my fiefs, but with a Scepter I will find new ones. Better ones. We will not die here, so peasants can tell pretty stories.”

Dyoakra flinches at the words. Acheal’s hand snaps out and cuffs him hard across the mouth. “Do not address me again,” he says, and when Dyoakra looks up, stunned but not surprised, Acheal steps behind him and twists his arm up between his shoulder blades until bone speaks. The pain is clean and wrong. The ceremonial wand rings once against the grate where Dyoakra drops it.

“My family,” Dyoakra gets through his teeth, because pain makes truth simple. “My mother and sister were at the booth. My father—my betrothed—”

“If they still live, they are Vlihet’s today and will live and die for whoever he gives Oif to before he leaves,” Acheal says, as if all of Dyoakra’s world, all he knows and loves, is a virtue ring to be bartered or stolen. He wrenches harder. The lead guard’s jaw tightens; she looks at Dyoakra and then away, because her math must include the stellarch.

“I can lead us to a culvert smugglers use,” Dyoakra says when he can breathe again, calm because calm keeps your shoulder in its socket. “It opens near Gate Three. If you want the lower ports, that’s the path. If you kill my arm, I’ll slow you. If you let me go, I’ll show the way.”

Acheal releases him abruptly, as if remembering that the Anthropotecture needs hands in working order. “Then move,” he says. “And shut that down.”

Dyoakra kills the feed. Hectron’s mouth remains open inside his head, still shaping please in front of a man who will never be the right one to hear it. He wants to tear the rod away and smash it against Acheal’s skull until it breaks, or the rod, whichever shatters first. He wants to find his mother and put his body between her and the wind. He wants to find Seilhar, save her from the golden brutes and find a place where this never happens.

He does not do any of those things.

He thinks of a culvert he can reach. He thinks of a place at the edge of the Ecorium where a boy can slip sideways into a world too busy to notice.

“Here,” he says, and crawls before staggering to his feet.

They pass from the maintained by schedule to the maintained by necessity. Underfoot, the grating’s pitch changes from city to shipyard. The heavy outside air keeps pouring down into the bones; their breaths steam and their mouths taste of metal.

The guard at the rear raises two fingers and squeezes them shut. Down. Now. Her whisper comes as less than breath. “Hulti Ashigar.”

They press into a recess behind a heat exchanger that wheezes like a sleeping thing. Footfalls slide over the grating: three black‑armored figures, stripped down from assault kit to hunt gear—thermal hoods, compact needlers, fan‑packs whispering not‑human rhythm. One carries a folded hunter; he tosses it and it wakes mid‑air, wings buzzing, nose seeking.

The cone grazes their hide and hesitates. A beep as small as laughter. The rear guard swears and pops up to shoot before the sound finishes being a sound. The drone pinwheels into silence. The Ashigar answer instantly. Sparks walk the wall beside Dyoakra’s ear. The lead guard takes a seam of darts across her plating and sits down hard with a surprised breath. She drags her weapon up anyway and keeps shooting.

“Go,” she says without turning. “Move. That way.”

They move. The rear guard drops a pop‑flare that smokes like boiled fleedbark and buys them a breath of blindness. Acheal stumbles in court boots and hates the deck for it. Dyoakra yanks him toward a side passage because there is one—there is always one where serfs hide their mistakes.

They run until running becomes an irregular jog. Dyoakra follows the maintainer marks until there are none left and then continues into a confused, overlapping, interconnected passage, two of which lead back in time. He picks one of the others and stops at a junction that looks like a hand missing fingers and stares at stains until they resolve into a map—oil, water, boot, wheel. The air ahead feels too still; pipes here sweat cold instead of warm.

“Left,” he says, and takes it.

Left is the wrong way. The scuff‑script that should ladder and cross has flattened into a smear. A purge hatch sits ahead with a red ring of warning paint rubbed smooth only on the inner arc. No one uses this exit unless they vanish through it. Dyoakra palms a coolant line to feel which way the flow remembers, tastes iron in a drip, realizes the faint breath of the Ecorium is behind them, not ahead.

He shifts to redirect—back two meters, then the narrow right with the dented brace—and in that heartbeat, a hunter’s distant ping needles the duct. The rear guard’s head flicks. Acheal reads the pause as a confession rather than a correction.

The blow lands at the back of Dyoakra’s head so hard the world skips. “You’ve lost us,” Acheal says, almost delighted to be right. He grabs Dyoakra’s shoulder and turns him into pain as if it were a handle. “You put my life at hazard. You are mine. Do not—”

Dyoakra swings before he decides to. His fist connects with bone and privilege. Acheal’s head snaps; his eyes widen with outrage that anyone dared to make him human.

The two remaining guards reach for both of them at once and get a handful of wrong. Four bodies tangle. Acheal pivots and flips Dyoakra into the wall; Dyoakra’s stubborn grip brings Acheal with him. The wall is more panel than wall. It gives.

They go with it.

The chute is a throat for things not meant to be touched—oozing mist, dust the color of old teeth, and cutting crystals.

Down. Faster and faster, and Dyoakra breathes the way he learn.  He thinks the way he learned. There's always a handhold to catch.

He takes a moment before the rage returns, and he changes his position so as to stomp his boot into Acheal's face until an option presents itself.

Metal snarls them, then lets go. The bright rod in Acheal’s hands draws a line across the dim like a falling star.

They fall.