Zephria: Beneath the Altitudes

They told you not to look down. But in Zephria, the sky was down. Sky above, sky below. Between them, an impossible collection of drifting islands, each hiding something it refused to explain. The bridges connecting them—weathered rope and bonewood—twisted with mossy tendrils and strange feathers that blinked if you stared too long.

Talla gripped the wind-skiff's levers, adjusting swiftly as manta-hide wings caught the relentless gale. Her instruments jittered. The altimeter spun erratically. The barometer had been stuck on Imminent Collapse for days. But here, devices lied. The truth was buried. Buried in wind, in light, in layers.

Zephria didn’t just float—it withheld.

She skimmed past the underbelly of Droxar Island, where waterfalls rose instead of fell, vanishing into spirals of mist. Old tales said the islands weren’t floating—they were held up by something. Something massive. Something that remembered.

Talla had read those stories. She’d believed them once, when her brother still flew beside her. Now, she was chasing one of them.

Cor vanished a year ago while leaping from Eroth to Tether’s Reach, and Talla had never stopped blaming herself. She’d dared him to make the jump, half in jest, unaware it would be the last moment they’d share. Since then, her grief had knotted itself into obsession—was she searching for her brother, or absolution? Her reasons shifted like the winds that carried her skiff, tangled in equal parts guilt, longing, and something darker: the gnawing feeling that if she didn't find the truth, she'd vanish next. Witnesses said his glider shimmered blue, then red, then vanished. No crash. No body. Nothing. It was as if Zephria had absorbed him.

Some said he’d fallen into the depths of the sky. Others whispered of hollow islands—places where the real Zephria hid beneath the floating shells.

He’d been obsessed with maps. With inconsistencies. With a myth few dared speak aloud: that Zephria was hollow, and under its crust was a city, or a machine, or a god dreaming.

Talla flew not only for him, but to confront the uncomfortable truth she’d long buried—that she too had seen signs, things she chose to ignore. Unexplainable echoes in the wind. Names whispered through closed windows. Shifting stars. Animals watching too closely. Her own memories looping back on themselves.

She’d begun charting anomalies: bridges that shifted twice in the same day, towns that appeared only on odd-numbered months, a boy she remembered from childhood who no one else did. She knew what she was doing was dangerous. Zephria punished curiosity.

Caelo, the central island, was Zephria’s heart. But hearts lie. It rearranged itself constantly. Streets changed if you second-guessed your destination. Buildings blinked. The people acted normal, but too normal—uncannily rehearsed. It was theater. A dance of denial.

She visited the Spire of Scales, where the air-oracles sang wind into symbols. The path wasn’t simple—she had to cross a broken bridge re-anchored by the wingless grounders of Tether’s Edge, a faction that distrusted Caelo and fought to reveal the truth beneath the islands. One of their leaders, Arren, challenged her. "Still chasing ghosts, Talla? Or have you come to pick a side?" She didn’t answer. She lied. He let her pass, but his expression said he knew. The tension lingered with her as she approached the Spire, heart still racing from the confrontation. The faction’s warnings echoed louder than the wind: not everyone wanted Zephria’s secrets exposed in the same way.

"You are looking in the wrong direction," said Oracle Venn. His eyes were covered in silver mesh. "Your brother fell not from the sky—but into it."

He handed her a Wind Slicer. Illegal. Dangerous. Capable of cutting through not just air, but barriers. He warned her, “You’ll find more than him. If you go beneath.”

Talla hesitated. Beneath meant confronting more than mystery—it meant confronting the thing she feared: that she too didn’t belong in the world above.

Talla flew below. Past the official atmospheric strata. Past sanctioned altitudes. Into the blue-black thrum beneath Zephria's lowest layer.

Here, the sky thickened. Became tactile. It hissed. Her glider strained as if resisting. Instruments died one by one.

Then she found it.

Not a rogue island, but the underside of Zephria itself. Flat. Pale. Scarred. And there—an entrance.

A hatch? A mouth? It opened like it had been expecting her.

Inside: silence. Then humming. Machines and corridors wound through the bones of the islands. Everything was etched with code, memory, regret. Architecture that adjusted itself as if remembering.

The deeper she went, the more real things felt. She passed rooms full of forgotten things: laughter in jars, unused apologies, clocks ticking in reverse.

She encountered people. Not many. Some wandered in silence, while others, like Veera, an archivist who had once led Caelo’s Ministry of Memory, spoke with urgency. Veera remembered Talla’s father—a dissident who vanished after uncovering falsified cartographies. She demanded to know why Talla had come. "If you won’t bring it all down, don’t you dare stir it up," Veera warned. Others were echoes—replicas of people who had once lived above. Copies Zephria had stored here like files in a corrupted archive. The friction between the still-aware and the archived created tension even here; memory was volatile, and not everyone wanted to be remembered.

One man believed he was a lighthouse keeper. He wept when he couldn’t find the ocean.

Another had wings grafted to his shoulders, failed attempts to mimic the gliders.

She found Cor—after barely escaping a collapsing corridor that tried to erase her path back. In that moment, she nearly gave up. It was the sound of Cor’s humming—something he used to do as a child—that pulled her forward through the shadows.

Not dead. Not alive. Integrated. His voice came through the walls. He emerged only as flickers in reflective surfaces.

"Zephria’s floating skin is a lie. This is the core. The storage. The edit bin. Everything they don’t want remembered comes here. Including people."

He explained that he’d tried to return—at first. But each attempt blurred his memories further, until he couldn't remember which version of himself was real. Now he preserved the things others lost. In a vault of echo-rooms, he cataloged forgotten lullabies, discarded feelings, secrets never confessed.

"They send the anomalies down here," he said. "The ones that make people question things."

Talla touched the wall. It pulsed. The machines recognized her. Knew her. Welcomed her.

"You came looking for what lies beneath. Now you are part of it. But you don’t have to vanish. You can choose. Stay and protect what the surface forgets. Or go back and tear away the lie."

Talla hesitated. The temptation to stay was overwhelming. Veera argued to keep her. "You're safer here. You're part of this place now," she insisted. But Arren, somehow also in the archive, having infiltrated deeper than anyone thought possible, confronted her in the echo-rooms. "You started something, Talla. If you leave, don’t leave it unfinished." Their heated argument was interrupted by the system itself beginning to stutter—lights dimming, corridors rewriting mid-step. Time to choose. She spent three days in the archive, learning what Zephria tried to bury. She found her mother’s erased diary. A political uprising that had once unified the islands before vanishing from records. A map of Zephria with twice as many islands as anyone remembered.

She chose to return.

But not to forget.

Caelo kept floating. Unaware. Or pretending.

Above, the wind howled.

Beneath, the island dreamed.

Talla emerged days later, changed. She didn’t speak of Cor. But the winds now responded to her whispers. She left symbols scratched beneath bridges, in alleyways, behind posters.

Others began seeing them. Others began asking questions.

And the bridges began to shift in her presence.

Something beneath had been disturbed.

It was no longer waiting.