4338.210 · July 29, 2018 AD
The Sky They Made Themselves
The switchbacks carry Joel down into a world he has no framework to understand. A cavern so vast the far walls disappear in haze. A ceiling scattered with drifting lights that pulse like breathing. Rivers that glow as they thread between buildings carved from living rock. Everything about this place defies what he thought he knew about his captors. And somewhere in the descent, a stranger offers something he desperately needs.
Joel expected a cave. A hole in the mountain where primitive people huddled in darkness, eking out survival far from the sun.
What he finds instead breaks something open in his chest.
The cavern is vast beyond comprehension—walls lost in distance, ceiling scattered with lights that drift and swirl like constellations drawn by a mad astronomer. Except these stars aren't fixed. They pulse. They breathe. They move in currents he can't feel, casting patterns across a darkness that suddenly doesn't feel dark at all.
The city climbs the walls in terraces. Buildings carved from stone, threaded with soft luminescence, styles layered over centuries—Spanish ironwork beside French shutters beside plain English practicality. And threading through it all, rivers of living light. Actual rivers, carrying water that glows with billions of tiny lives.
Joel is cargo. Strapped to a mule, arms bound, legs dead, being carried toward a cell and a judgement he can't predict. He has no right to wonder. No business feeling awe.
But he feels it anyway.
And when a stranger falls into step beside his mule and offers something small and warm and alive, Joel learns that not everything in Xylora is as dark as it seems.
