Seagull Plague
Geryon's Code Cycle | The Orphaned Earth | Chapter 5
Randy de la Serna – September 2, 2192
With a thud, the one-eared cat Ginger landed on the old sofa where Randy de la Serna was sleeping, curled next to his stepbrother Arseny. Ginger, a fluff-covered schemer blessed with no fewer than six senses, always knew whose turn it was to make breakfast—and he was rarely wrong.
Randy lay on his stomach, facing a tiny window that hadn’t yet begun to catch the first hints of morning light. Prowling softly across the bed, Ginger crept close and brushed his long whiskers against Randy’s face. Still deep in sleep, the young man murmured something incoherent and hugged the cat to his chest like a plush toy.
Getting squeezed by a young blacksmith was not Ginger’s idea of cozy. The cat wriggled, then gave Randy’s arm a good, sincere chomp.
“Hey!” Randy yelped, flinging Ginger off and springing to his feet like a loaded spring—miraculously not waking Arseny in the process. He raked a hand through his messy chestnut hair, shuffled to the washbasin, and broke the thin layer of ice floating on the water. Grimacing, he splashed his face, then soaked a dried sea sponge and scrubbed down his upper body, already hardened by long days at the forge.
In a room that had gone ice-cold overnight, drying off with a rough towel and dragging on a bristly sweater was its own brand of comfort. Combing out the tangled nest of hair he’d grown overnight? Less so. The bone comb lost two teeth in the battle.
Sighing, Randy stoked the stove and rummaged through the kitchen drawers, hunting for anything edible.
Dr. Osokin’s refrigerator, an old metal trunk from the electric days, had long since been relegated to the shed. Packed with chipped ice, it still stored shellfish, fish, and—rarely—meat.
But Randy wasn’t about to go stomping out to the shed after finally getting warm. He was beyond done with dried and smoked stuff. The yak cheese was all but gone.
I’ll be hungry by the time I hit the forge... and Masako’s definitely going to say something.
Skipping breakfast never escaped her notice.
Then—salvation: a basket of eight chicken eggs, a thank-you from one of Osokin Senior’s patients. He got to work on an omelet, tossing in what little cheese he had and some rehydrated veggies from the night before.
He didn’t wait for anyone else—he had his reasons for wanting an early start at the forge. But just as he reached for a plate, that reason came down the stairs.
“Randolph,” his father said, stern and sharp. “What do you have to say for yourself this time?”
“Good morning,” Randy mumbled, caught off guard but trying for a smile.
“That basket with the dummy you launched yesterday—right over the town…”
“I let it go over the sea, Father. Over the sea,” Randy insisted, lowering his voice like gravity alone could make him sound more reasonable.
“And you checked the wind direction?”
“There was no wind! Absolute stillness. At first, it rose straight up—”
“And higher up? You didn’t think the wind might be blowing there?” Osokin shouted. “You’re just shy of eighteen…”
January, Randy thought, it’s barely September.
“Agreed,” he said quietly.
Osokin blinked, surprised by the lack of resistance. But only for a moment.
“You think I don’t know what happens when something like that falls from ten meters? That it wouldn’t kill someone? Is that why you loaded it with rocks?”
“No one got hurt!” Randy shouted, finally snapping.
“Shame,” Osokin snapped back. “Maybe you didn’t put in enough effort.”
“There were two stones. For weight.” Randy’s voice trembled. “I stuffed them into the dummy so the cats or chickens wouldn’t get hurt if it landed nearby. And it’s too cold for swimming right now anyway...”
Then, half to himself:
“Really, we need to see how it flies at negative temperatures. It’s probably going to be above freezing today...”
“Oh, perfect,” Osokin grunted. “Now you’re trying to knock out some gulls too?”
There was no point arguing anymore. Randy could feel it. And truth be told, the timing was bad.
The last few days, dead seabirds had started appearing in the streets—gulls, skuas, albatrosses—lured inland by the scent of fish scraps and the easy pickings of stray house pets.
Worse still, two days ago, a fisherman named Sven had caught a petrel to make soup. Now he and his entire family lay unconscious in Osokin’s clinic, feverish and fading.
Seabirds used to keep their distance—smart enough to avoid ending up in a stew. Now they circled overhead, came in low and were getting bolder.
Parents had stopped letting their children walk to school alone. Beyond the town—and especially along the coast—the risk of infection or outright attack grew sharper by the day.
“This is the last time I’m saying it—stay inside the gates. If you don’t…”
Osokin paused, searching for the most dreadful punishment he could conjure.
“…you’re sleeping in the shed!”
Randy raised his eyebrows and took a slow sip of water, feigning terror at the sentence.
Truth was, he liked the shed. There, he could hammer, saw, and build all night without a single complaint.
“Actually, why wait? You’re sleeping there tonight! Maybe that’ll wake up your sense of responsibility.”
Randy bit back a smile. Did Osokin really still think he was a child who could be scolded into obedience?
“What’s going on?” Alda’s sleepy voice called from the stairs. “Did I hear someone say shed?”
Randy’s heart jumped. His mother stepping in on his behalf always hit differently—made him feel small in a way his father’s nagging never could. She descended slowly, deliberately. She always moved like that—graceful, steady, like a queen entering court. That quiet regal presence had always captivated Randy.
“Is this the new ritual—arguing before a single bite of food?” she asked, her voice calm but edged with warning. Like thunder grumbling far off before the storm.
“So now we’re pretending nothing’s wrong?” Osokin barked. “As if our scatterbrain here doesn’t pull some stunt every damn week?”
Randy flushed. Every damn week? In truth, he barely had time to breathe—yet somehow, his father always assumed he did nothing but scheme.
“Can we not do this, Dad?” Arseny mumbled from the stove, rubbing his eyes. He'd long given up on trying to catch a few extra minutes of sleep.
“Wash your face, you lazy lump,” Osokin snapped, forgetting Arseny’s shift wasn’t until later.
“Fine, Ilya—the shed it is,” Alda said coolly, throwing Randy a subtle wink. She always knew what he was thinking before he did. And she’d supported his ambitions ever since Rakhmanov’s visit.
“And you, Randolph,” she added with a knowing tone, “put the experiments aside—at least until summer.”
He hated his full name. It sounded too ceremonial. Too heavy. A word dragged out when someone was disappointed in him.
Among most Antarctica’s settlers, naming traditions had mostly dissolved in the cultural stew—but some, like the Koreans, Japanese, and Russians, still clung to theirs.
Osokin’s first wife, Nina, killed by a detached blood clot during her second pregnancy, had been of Russian origin. Alda’s roots, by contrast, ran deep into Argentina.
Their sons couldn’t have been more different, as if born from different elements.
Even Osokin joked they were ice and fire. Arseny was cool, stoic, methodical. Randy was restless, ablaze with thoughts he could barely contain.
After breakfast, the family scattered across the city. Randy headed to the forge. Alda to the school, where she passed on knowledge her father had once passed to her.
Ilya Osokin returned to the clinic, still running on salvaged tools and a precious stockpile of meds saved from the Old World.
Arseny was going to the city greenhouse for his weekly shift. Tending crops was a communal effort—a deal struck after the Blackout, a bulwark against hunger. Here they grew turnips, edible lichen, cold-resistant potatoes, and mushrooms. In warmer months, beds yielded vegetables.
Nearby, enclosures bred snails and crickets, feeding on plant scraps—and later, feeding the people. Each household kept its own patch—indoors or just outside the walls—but only here, in the great greenhouse, did the warmth never fade.
The structure, forged with Golden Age knowledge, held heat like memory. Its warmth came from the sky itself: roof-mounted mirrors tracked the sun’s slow arc, concentrating light into a water tank that fed heat through the building’s pipes.
The original design came from Novolazarevskaya Station, born of survival instinct—and over time, it spread across the frozen land like a quiet miracle.
Another landmark stood in McMurdo: the Hall of Contests, its smooth dome pale as polished bone. Once built for sports, it now housed yaks—descendants of an experimental herd imported from Buryatia nearly eighty years ago.
Osokin’s clinic stood high on a hill, still marked with a rooftop helipad where two helicopters once landed—long since dismantled for parts and scrap. It towered over the rest of the settlement. Only the waste processing plant, off to the side, stood taller.
Randy accompanied Arseny on his way to the greenhouse—to buy a couple of crickets for Masako. Not as a treat. For company.
The melancholic chirp of the insects was music to her ears. Real music—something the forge’s mistress adored. She never missed a chance to listen when the old Latino fisherman known as Mariachi strummed his timeworn guitar.
“Too much carcass on the streets,” Arseny murmured, worry threading through his voice.
“Huh?” Randy asked, blinking as if woken from a dream.
Once again, his thoughts had swallowed him—schematics and theories about levitating objects looping in his mind while the world faded to static. He walked beside his brother like a ghost, feet moving on autopilot.
Arseny sighed and pointed ahead.
Five white bird corpses lay in plain view on the path. Feathers rustled gently in the breeze. A few had come loose and swirled down the street like they were mourning something.
Among the cherry-red and deep blue modular homes of the Old Quarter, beneath a clear, innocent-looking dawn sky, the scene felt especially bleak.
“This is bad,” Arseny muttered, stepping closer to one of the birds. “They were dying yesterday too,” he added, wrinkling his nose. “Just not this many.”
“How many people are sick?” Randy asked.
“Six…”
“Let’s just hope it’s not the Black Death,” Randy whispered, trying to suppress the nausea rising in his throat. “You know, like when Dad used to scare us as kids…”
“Damn it, shut up! Don’t jinx it,” Arseny muttered—though Randy had said exactly what he’d been thinking.
“Should we tell him?”
“He must already know”
“Hope the chickens don’t catch it,” Arseny said darkly. “No eggs, no breakfast.”
He clapped Randy’s hand, then peeled off toward the greenhouse with a light, bouncing gait, fingers ruffling his straw-colored hair.
Randy lingered.
He picked up a cricket for Masako, along with two turnips, then strode toward the forge. Along the way, he spotted two more dead skuas—this time, mid-meal. One was being devoured right in the middle of the street, its kin tearing at it unbothered by the passing humans.
He sprinted toward the forge, nearly breaking into a run—the thin wisp of smoke rising from the chimney told him Masako was already there.
Before the Blackout, the place had been a repair station run by her parents, Hideo and Akemi Matsubara. They used to fix everything—electric cars, snowmobiles, furniture, portable devices.
After the catastrophe, most of it was junk without power. But Hideo—restless, clever, and a trained physicist—refused to let it die. He rigged machines to run on hand cranks, foot pedals, even flowing water. The water tank was filled by rain or pumped in from the sea and desalinated by engineered microbes.
Metal cutters and drills still lined the wall opposite the entrance. The forge itself, rebuilt from scratch, burned in the back corner, a cylinder of salvaged steel and stone. The old heating system was long dead, but the forge still lived.
Masaru, Masako’s older brother, had been born after the Blackout—frail, fragile. He didn’t survive his first winter.
For six long years, Akemi bore no more children. So when Masako came, Hideo welcomed her as the legacy he didn’t know he’d been waiting for. It didn’t matter if the heir was a son or daughter. Only the grit mattered.
Masako had plenty of that.
Akemi tried—first gently, then firmly—to raise her “like a proper woman.” Masako never listened. Eventually, Akemi stopped asking.
Hideo drowned when Masako was grown—a sudden storm, a boat, friends shouting from shore, and then darkness.
Akemi folded inward. Now, she spoke only to her daughter and rarely stepped outside. Randy, who began apprenticing under Masako at twelve, had seen Akemi perhaps ten times in total. - tiny, tidy and silent.
Old man Mariachi once claimed Masako almost married an apprentice—someone five years her junior, maybe more.
They worked side by side for a while. Then one day, the boy left—chasing dreams, or running from something. Railtown. Maybe the Seven Winds.
Masako shut the forge for a week. No one saw her.
Rumors spun fast: that she’d walked into the sea with stones in her coat. But she came back, looking fine. Too fine, maybe. She picked up her tools like nothing had happened.
Whatever really broke or didn’t, she didn’t take on another apprentice for years, except Randy. Most folks figured it was a favor—Masako repaying Ilya Osokin, who’d once saved Akemi’s life.
Randy hadn’t even reached the door when a high, sharp scream split the air—almost too shrill for the human ear.
Out of instinct, he dove sideways.
A gray blur dropped from the sky and slammed into the forge wall with a wet, bone-crunching smack. Blood sprayed across the whitewashed surface.
Feathers floated down like ash.
He stood frozen, breath caught, heart hammering. Then—cautiously—he stepped toward the thing.
It was a skua, or what was left of one. It hadn’t slowed. Hadn’t swerved. It had dived straight for him.
As long as Randy remembered, birds of prey didn’t miss their dives. Not in such a ridiculous and deadly manner.
Just hope Arseny doesn’t run into one. With his luck…
Still shaken, Randy shoved open the door and stepped into the forge’s warm hall.
Masako was already there, stoking the fire with a pair of homemade bellows.
She was small—half a head shorter than Randy—broad-faced, sun-kissed, with sharp gray eyes. Her thick fringe hung just above her brows; the rest of her hair was braided into a plait as thick as her arm.
But what caught Randy’s eye first was the bandage wrapped around her neck.
“Morning, Mistress Matsubara,” he said, handing her the box with the cricket, still breathless.
She nodded—gruff, unreadable.
“Better stay off the streets,” Randy added. “A skua just attacked me.”
“So it got you too.” She tapped her neck. “They say birds can get rabies. Like dogs.”
“Don’t recall rabies making birds dive-bomb buildings,” he muttered. “I’ll talk to Father, bet he knows more. Anyway, you must rush to the clinic.”
“We’ve got a commission we can’t afford to delay.”
“If the birds are rabid,” Randy said flatly, “there won’t be anyone left to order commissions.”
Masako looked toward the glowing forge, visibly reluctant to leave it unattended. A pot on the stove gave off a thin curl of steam.
“Tea?” she asked, in a tone that could just as easily have meant get lost.
“Sure.” Randy didn’t argue. His legs were trembling, and he still hadn’t taken off his thick, hooded coat—originally Dr. Osokin’s, passed down like armor.
She checked the water, then pulled a teapot and two matte-black cups from a cabinet tucked in the farthest corner. The cups were rough, stone-textured, and fit neatly into her palms. What they were about to drink barely counted as tea. Didn’t matter. She brewed it like it was a sacred rite.
“So,” Randy said, settling onto one of the old poufs near the low table, “what’s on the forging agenda today?”
“You’re gonna die laughing. A battle axe.”
His eyebrows shot up, grin forming instantly.
“Who’s the badass this time?”
“Guess in three tries.”
“…Prince?”
“Bingo.”
“Seriously? What for?”
“To look extra-important,” she snorted, pouring steaming water over the herbs. “Still, gotta give him credit—he paid in full.” She nodded toward a squat sack of coal resting by the wall.
Randy’s cheeks flushed red—again. Not just from the forge’s heat. He would’ve loved nothing more than to smash that bandit right between the eyes with the nearest hammer—the same bastard who once looted the city and was now selling the locals their own coal back.
“Miss Matsubara, please, go to the clinic,” Randy said, voice hoarse. “I’ll handle the work. My father always said, with rabies, every minute could count. Just… be careful.”
Masako gave him a skeptical look.
She’d let her apprentice take on commissions alone before, sure—but in her mind, the margin for error was still too steep.
“I’ve only got one blank for an axe,” she replied flatly.
In a land where trees were almost sacred and whale bones were sawn, not split, axes weren’t exactly a hot commodity.
“Name even one commission I’ve botched this whole year,” he challenged.
“Not one,” she admitted. “But I was always watching you.”
She sighed.
“Alright. Heat the blank. But don’t overdo it.” Her voice softened slightly. Masako cared deeply about every piece she made—even if it was for scum.
They finished their tea faster than usual. The ritual normally helped them settle into the rhythm of work. Not today.
Masako wrapped herself in her dog-fur coat, strapped on her winter respirator, goggles, scarf. She grabbed a long iron rod—the only defense against whatever the skies might drop next—and left the forge in silence.
Randy stared at the rectangular blank she’d left him, welded to its rough handle. The temptation to sabotage it—maybe a fracture during tempering, maybe a micro-flaw in the blade—was almost unbearable. But respect for Masako and the chance the flaw might show up early held him back.
Besides, if the axe turned out well, he might use it as a model for his own. Crossbows had range—but they broke, jammed, splintered. Axes were simple. Reliable. Brutal.
“I’ll use your weapon as practice for mine, you old devil,” Randy thought as he tied his hair back and got to work.
The Prince and his men—along with a chunk of the Moon Cross the same fanatics who’d carved up South America and landed on the Antarctic Peninsula behind the Bloody Apostle—were all descended from soldiers.
But when they rolled up to the coal depot, guns out, it wasn’t conquest they were after. They wanted comfort, leverage and someone to boss around while they ate well and stayed warm. There was no need to storm the city. You just took the heat source, locked down the trade roads, and waited. In this frozen land, the rest would kneel on their own.
Before Rakhmanov, no one had dared touch the Prince’s thugs. The few who tried didn’t stay around long.
But when Randy saw that the outsider cut one of those bastards down out at the Dump - something clicked.
He told himself: One day… I’ll learn how to fight back.
The problem was, the guards—local or not—answered to the so-called “owners.”
And the city itself was full of people raised from fisherman blood. Farmer blood. Tinker blood.
Good people, just not ones ready for war. And Randy had no idea how to wake them up.
He was hammering out the axe—glowing orange-red, sparks spitting from the anvil—when the door creaked open, letting in a blast of cold. Masako was back.
He set the hammer down, heart picking up speed.
“So?”
“You volunteered. Keep working.”
Her voice was flat. She unwrapped her scarf.
“I got ‘lucky’—first in line today. After me, two more came in. Same symptoms. There’ll be more by nightfall.”
Masako moved to the stove and began brewing tea again. Her movements were mechanical. Faded.
Randy worked, but watched her from the corner of his eye.
There was a fresh bandage on her neck, but she didn’t look better. She looked like someone cut from her own heat source.
The blacksmith drained her tea fast. Then stood.
“Actually—no. I’ll finish the axe. You start on the fasteners for your flyer. Forge a few spares while you’re at it.”
Randy blinked. She’d never let him start his own projects first.
Without a word, he crossed to the wall shelf and pulled down a box of blanks—scrap metal from the Dump. Even after the Rakhmanov incident, he still went out there, scouring the wrecks for salvage.
By the time Masako quenched the axe in brine, the sun had shifted well past noon. Steam hissed. The blade went dark. Still unpolished, unsharpened. But it already had a brutal shape, beautiful in a way.
A hooked curve, like a predator’s claw.
“The doc had a vaccine,” she said, lifting the axe in tongs and handing it over. “But it expired fifteen years ago. Might as well be puddle water.”
“That’s it?” Randy frowned.
Masako gave a snort.
“You act like you don’t know my father. Of course not.”
She set the tongs down.
“He jabbed me with that... that paci… pinci…”
“Penicillin,” Randy said gently. “Good stuff. Can knock out pneumonia, even childbed fever—if you catch it early.”
“Still don’t feel right,” Masako muttered, wiping sweat from her brow. “You’re sweating buckets. I’m freezing. Feels like I’m zipped in an ice bag.”
Randy stared at her.
“You’re feverish,” he said, alarm creeping into his voice.
“Damn right I am. Your dad gave me a shot—said to do another tomorrow…”
“And now?”
“Heat me a barrel for a bath,” Masako said, already heading upstairs to check on her mother.
The barrel sat in the center of the tiny neighboring room, perched over a grated floor depression where a fire burned underneath. Randy pumped the water, left it to heat, and—gloomy now—set about preparing a late meal.
Dr. Osokin didn’t return until midnight. He didn’t bother hiding his worry. Twelve new patients, he said. Same symptoms: fever, coughing, choking and feats of anger. Arseny stayed behind to help at the clinic.
Most of the infected were women—probably from handling birds. At school, two kids who never missed class were absent.
Ilya suspected relict microorganisms—ancient spores that had waited millions of years beneath the ice. Some got infected through wounds, others just by breathing.
Despite the precautions at the hospital, and Alda warming a bath just for him, the doctor refused to sleep in the bedroom. Randy offered up his place on the sofa. His stepfather chose the floor.
“Maybe we should inform the Prince?”
“I’ll see him tomorrow. Every bird in the city needs to be slaughtered and burned. Announcing it won’t work. People always think they’ll be fine.”
“Think he’ll actually do something?”
“If he doesn’t,” Osokin said, rolling over, “there won’t be anyone left to feed him.”
Randy hesitated.
“What about Masako?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor whispered. “Same goes for the rest of them…”
He closed his eyes.
“When you finish at the forge tomorrow, bring me something to eat. I’ll be out all day.”
Half an hour later, Osokin snored lightly on the floor. Randy slid off the stove, barefoot, and made his way to his mother’s room.
Alda wasn’t asleep. He knew it. She never slept well when her husband was under the same roof but not beside her. A soft lumiflor lit the room. Alda was studying a large sheet of paper in her lap—a map, beautifully patterned, unrolled with great care.
“What’s that?” Randy asked, lowering beside her.
“Expanded map of the continent,” she replied, not looking up. “Can’t sleep either?”
“Nope. What’s it for?”
She hesitated—then gave in. Nowhere left to hide.
“Eino, your father from Port Amundsen, drew it. These lines… these dots… those are his hands moving.”
At those words, something in her changed. Her eyes glowed, her posture lifted. For a moment, Randy saw her ten years younger. He’d never seen her look at Osokin like that, despite their friendship and mutual respect.
“Will you show me?”
“Please, handle it with care.”
Randy unfolded the map—and nearly forgot to breathe. It wasn’t paint—it was burned into the thick surface. Not damaged. Just precise. As if someone had hovered above the pole in a spaceship’s porthole and traced every fjord, island, inland lake, and river vein with reverence.
The young man traced the Railroad, finger following every twist, every branch.
“It’s all torn apart now,” Alda said quietly.
He nodded. Of course it was. Floods. Rockfalls. Raiders.
“The Sea of Cosmonauts… Queen Alexandra’s Ridge… Sounds peaceful,” Randy murmured. “They flew into space from here?”
“They did.”
“And now?”
“The road was lost in an earthquake,” she whispered. “No news for years.”
“It’s closer than Heliopolis. Why didn’t you show me earlier?”
“Because everything had to be hidden from you when you were little—you broke and ruined so much.” A faint smile. “This is the only thing I have left from Eino. I couldn’t bear to lose it.”
“Until tonight?”
“Of course not…”
A long silence.
“Or were you afraid I’d end up on one of those spots?”
“I was afraid,” she whispered, “you wouldn’t make it to one alive.”
Randy didn’t say anything. He gently rolled up the map and held it out, but she pushed it back.
“It’s yours now. Don’t lose it. The tube’s on the windowsill.”
He hugged her, holding tight. He realized just how rarely he’d done that these past few years.
“I made us all face masks,” Alda said, showing him three neatly stitched cloth pieces. “It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. Take one for yourself, one for Masako and her mom.”
“Maybe you should close the school.”
“Already done.”
He barely slept. By dawn, Alda was already up cooking.
For the first time in almost six years, Randy felt fear walking to the forge. Not because of raiders or cold—but because the smoke from Masako’s chimney was barely there. A weak thread. A whisper.
He broke into a jog.
Masako was obviously sick - gray-skinned, soaked in sweat, hair in damp, fevered tangles. The wound on her neck had gone purple, and each word sounded like it drained the life out of her. She didn’t speak at first and just watched, blankly, from the couch as Randy forged a knife blank from an old rail. Didn’t correct or scold him.
By midday, she was wrapped in blankets, shivering, delirious. She handed off all the day’s orders without protest. That’s when he knew: no more waiting.
Wearing the mask, eyes shielded, Randy carried his teacher himself—gently, carefully—to the clinic. She weighed less than he remembered.
He laid her down in the last empty cot. The air in the hospital hit like a wall—thick, sour, decaying. A warehouse of rot. Already, twenty infected. Two had died just that morning.
“I dissected two bird carcasses,” Doctor Osokin muttered, climbing with his foster son to the helipad in order to breathe some fresh air. “Lungs full of mold. We are n dealing with bacteria or virus. It’s fungus—like our lumiflor mold. Judging by what we’ve seen, it suppresses the immune system and intoxicates the brain. And hell, it spreads fast. Too fast.”
“How can you and Arseny keep risking it?” Randy asked, bitter.
“We’ve got suits,” Osokin said, patting the tight turquoise fabric over his chest. “Still… the one really risking it right now—is you.”
A sudden scream cut through the wind. A man was running toward the hospital, waving his arms wildly.
Randy flinched. It was Phil, the gardener. He wasn’t babbling. Wasn’t mad. But his eyes—they held more fear than Randy had seen in anyone.
Randy rushed down the stairs to meet him.
“Anyone else sick?”
Phil bent, choking for breath.
“I’m not,” he gasped. “The Moon Cross is attacking Prince’s lair.”
Fan of postapocalyptic / grimhope / sci-fi adventures?
absolutely stunning! the pacing, the characters, and the quiet dread building with each paragraph… i’m totally hooked. also, as someone who edits a lot of longform, your structure and clarity are just chef’s kiss. subscribed and staying tuned!