About this universe
As the shadow of the eclipse crawls across Oros-Khai, Tuan Tran must descend from the ruinous scaffolds of Scab-City and breach the Gilded Vault’s layered defenses. Only by releasing the encrypted log of the spared sky-whale can he expose the truth, and survive the nightmarish guardians lurking where reality thins.
Tone
Tense and kinetic, with undercurrents of regret and frantic hope.
Themes
memory and guilt, exploitation vs. liberation, the cost of truth
Protagonist
Tuan Tran
Tuan Tran moves with a wariness honed by exile, compact, wiry, with a scar tracing his left cheekbone. His battered armor bears the faded crest of the Obsidian Guard beneath a scavenged cloak. Eyes sharp, jaw tense, Tran’s sense of purpose radiates in the set of his shoulders and the silence of his resolve.
Goal: To infiltrate the Gilded Vault and release the encrypted log of the spared sky-whale before the eclipse causes widespread chaos.
How it begins
Tuan Tran jams his gloved fingers between two panels of trembling sheet metal, bracing his boots on a rusted pipe as Scab-City thrums below. Sweat beads along his brow, despite the chill that seeps from the marrow conduits overhead. Down the gullet of a service shaft, voices echo, the Gilded Vault’s night guards, joking about eclipse bonuses, their laughter sharp like broken glass. Tran breathes in slow, eyes flicking to the glitching wrist-slate on his arm: countdown to blackout, four minutes. Somewhere above, the eclipse’s shadow crawls, warping light and logic. The air shudders as a guttural, not-quite-human alarm mutters from the vault’s underbelly. Tran shifts, loosening the clasp on his battered cloak, and slides his lock-pick into the access panel. The marrow-light spasms, refracting off pooling condensation. He listens for the lull in patrol-patterns, heart hammering, as the world threatens to tilt sideways.
About this world
Oros-Khai is a floating archipelago of crumbling isles, tethered by humming gravity-spires powered by the marrow of ancient sky-whales. The luminous spires above teem with decadent nobility, while Scab-City festers below with exiles and mercenaries. Reality here is fragile, defined by resource extraction and hidden rebellion.
Oros-Khai drifts through endless blue, a constellation of islands clustering above a bottomless drop. Each isle is anchored by a gravity-spire, a tapered monolith brimming with bone-bright light, its heart fed by processed sky-whale marrow. The sky is never empty: sapphire mists swirl around the spires, and the shadows of great, dreaming leviathans drift overhead. Above, the upper archipelago is all opulence: marble terraces, filigreed bridges, and nobility so insulated by privilege they barely notice the tremors in reality below. Their power derives from strict control of sky-whale hunting, marrow-processing, and the security of the Gilded Vault, a fortress said to house the navigational logs and relics of every major hunt. Below, Scab-City clings to the undersides. It’s a vertical slum of scaffolded shanties, grease-slick catwalks, and secret markets. Exiled aristocrats, disgraced mercenaries, and marrow-runners trade in secrets, sabotage, and forbidden tech. Gravity is fickle here; a misstep can send a body drifting into the void. Stories twist through the alleys: of marrow-poisoned children, of whales that dream in words, of uprisings three spires ago. The city is ruled by shifting alliances, among thief-lords, info-brokers, and fanatics who see the whales as holy. Technology is patchwork, scavenged from above or hacked from marrow-powered engines. The most valuable currencies are information and access. At the heart of current unrest is the fate of the sky-whales: some see them as resources, others as kin or gods. Every eclipse, the boundary between the dreaming whales and reality flickers, and secrets threaten to rise from the depths.
