The Engineered World of the Cloudline

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!

RootBane

The beetles. Somebody made them to eat the vine. Nothing else. That was their plan, as far as I can find in the archives. Predators. Let them loose and clear the vine.

Dren saw it before I did. A leaf in the Hall, cut wrong along one edge, the one beneath it eaten hollow. Veins holding shape around nothing.

The song holds them under. Low, threaded through the rock, so steady you stop hearing it. They eat the vine. But why the rope?

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. A doorway...

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. I think they are both

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. The teachers are gone.

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 -

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.

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. Maybe the lesson is people will burn anything to keep the dark away. ???

The Cloudline

I don't know how they make it. That's tower work, tower secrets. So this isn't how it works. It's only what it does.

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, 2 skies

They'll tell you it's for the climate. But you don't build a wall of weather across a city by accident and forget to put a door in it.

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!