Topeagler Access

The sphere convulsed. Its wire snapped. Its internal crystal cracked under the weight of so much grief. It sank, its light dying, and came to rest on the chamber floor, a dead black egg in the ruins.

A ship. No—a machine . It hovered three feet above the water, supported by spinning rotors of mirrored metal. Its hull was white and seamless, like a tooth. No sails, no oars, no smoke. It was beautiful. And it was heading directly toward her spire. topeagler

Kaelira was old. Her brass feathers had dulled to a patina of green and rust. One of her three amber eyes—arranged in a triangle atop her broad head—had gone white with cataract. Her left wing bore a scar from a poacher’s harpoon, fired twenty years ago by a man named Sorvus, who now lay buried in the belly of a sinkhole, his bones picked clean by crystal shrimp. The sphere convulsed

She turned and swam deeper, into the coral ruins. The passages were tight—too tight for the sphere to follow. She scraped her wings against jagged edges, losing feathers, losing skin, but she did not stop. It sank, its light dying, and came to

It meant: I was here.

On the morning this story begins, Kaelira launched herself from the Spire of Sticks—a precarious tower of woven branches and mud that she had built herself, year after year, until it stood fifteen feet above the highest flood line. Her wings, though scarred, caught the sulfurous wind. She climbed. Not high—the Topeagler was never a creature of the open sky. She preferred the liminal space, ten feet above the water, where her shadow could slide over the surface like a promise.