The Engineered World of the Cloudline

How Halidom survives after the Great Weathering

From the field journal of Braelan Verid.

Seedbinders write things down before we understand them. My parents taught me that. You don't wait until things make sense. By then you've already decided what it means, and you've stopped questioning.

These are the notes I took. Some I got wrong.

The World

Contains spoilers for Beneath the Cloudline.

The Old Beacon

It fired three days ago. Fifty years without a sound, then it woke half the Spire. Something triggered it. I’ve been watching for a reply. Mother says it's a waste of time. But old beacons don’t wake themselves, and nothing around here is coincidence.

No answer.

Update: It felt something beneath us.

Glow-Lichen

The lichen is just light, mostly. Rooted children keep it in jars. So do we. I've kept mine for years, coaxing a single strand down a carved channel, and it glows only when it decides to. It continues to resist. Some nights it goes still in my hands, like it's listening. I'm convinced it knows things we don't.

Annoyingly stubborn!

Glyphs

The marks aren't decoration, and they aren't a language, not the way talking is a language. Each one holds a story. The faithful call them prayers. We call them math. Father says they were meant to outlast the ones who understood them. Knowledge you can hand to a stranger a hundred years out. Most of it we can't read anymore.

How did Jules draw the ancient marks?

The Archive

Keep wondering why the lower doors are sealed. Going to find a way in somehow.

Locked to keep us out or keep something in?

Update: Got in & downloaded everything.

The Cloudline

I don't know how they made it. So this isn't how it works. It's only what it does. They say it's just for the rain. It sits partway up the towers, a flat white ceiling of cloud, and it decides. Above it: light, dry air, the people who make the rules. Below it: mist, wet stone, the people the rules are made about.

Same city, two skies.

The Bloom

Found it low, in the rocks, where nothing should grow. Sya said the Bloom was yellow. Weathering-era. Gone. This was purple. I brought a cutting back. Mother didn't say anything, which is worse than if she had. Probably a variant. I have the color. I'll start there.

Update: It wasn't gone. It was waiting!

IRAL?

Salt

Nothing about the salt is supposed to concern us. It's the city's work. Where the salt lies, the Bloom doesn't?

- Investigate further -

Sapfire

They distill it from Bloom sap. You bleed the thing that's trying to bury the city, you refine what comes out. It burns clean and blue and bright enough to read by. Half the light in the city is the vine, rendered down and set on fire. No one seems to feel the strangeness of that but me.

People burn anything to keep the dark away.

The Orchids

Jax's father told me where to look. One leaf edge cut where it shouldn’t be. The orchids look healthy by every measure, but the soft tissue is disappearing between the veins.

Growth rates dipped. The light?

Dad brought in the hawks.

The Harmonic Network

I grew up thinking every child could feel a wall singing. I was wrong about that too. The network carries one note through the whole under-city. Stone to stone, node to node, so the song that holds the beetles should never stop. Cut one repeater and the note doesn't die everywhere. It fades.

The gateway in...

The Caverns

These are older than Halidom, cut when this whole basin was underwater. All of it dry now. This is where the song has to reach if the beetles are to hold. The deepest, worst places are exactly the ones a repeater has to sing into. We've gone as far as the song goes. We don't go past that.

Not yet.

Algae Fuel

We've kept one tower alive for decades by growing algae and separating oil from it. One tower is not ten. I hope we have time.

Brighter than last week.

Still years away.

The journal isn't finished, because the learning isn't. Whoever picks this up after me, remember: nature is patient. People are not. — Brae

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