Untitled Episode
The Ashes of Meridian Sky — Chapter 1: Falling Altitude
Meridian Sky was not built to fall.
That was the first thing Jace Venn learned when he was twelve, staring up through a maintenance hatch at the endless underside of the city. Above him, layers of metal and light stretched upward into the clouds, disappearing into brightness so intense it looked like a second sun had been trapped inside the structure.
Now, at seventeen, he knew better.
Everything falls. It just takes time.
The engine bay trembled again.
Jace braced himself against a coolant pipe as a low vibration rolled through the floor plating. A warning tone echoed through the chamber—soft at first, then sharp enough to sting the ears.
“Not again,” he muttered.
A holographic panel flickered in front of him, unstable blue light stuttering as it tried to maintain shape.
GRAVITY CORE FLUCTUATION — SECTOR 4B
Below the text, a second line blinked into existence, then disappeared.
Jace narrowed his eyes. “That’s new.”
He climbed down from the maintenance frame, dropping lightly onto the grated floor below. The engine bay was massive—an open vertical shaft where the city’s gravity anchors floated suspended in magnetic fields. Each one pulsed with slow, controlled energy.
Or at least, they were supposed to.
One of them wasn’t pulsing anymore.
It was flickering.
Like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to exist.
Jace pulled his tool kit closer and crossed the platform bridges toward the failing anchor. Beneath him, the city dropped away in layers—industrial zones, transit rings, habitation tiers—stacked like a machine built inside a dream no one fully understood anymore.
Meridian Sky hovered above a dead Earth.
Or what was left of it.
Nobody down there mattered anymore.
Except gravity.
And gravity was starting to forget its job.
“Hey! You’re not cleared for that sector!”
The voice echoed across the bay.
Jace didn’t stop walking.
A security drone descended from above, rotating in place as its scanning lights locked onto him.
“Identify yourself.”
Jace sighed. “Jace Venn. Maintenance Tier 3. And I’m about to keep this city from turning into scrap metal, so if you want to file paperwork later, feel free.”
The drone paused.
It wasn’t programmed for sarcasm.
That gave him exactly three seconds of advantage.
He reached the anchor just as it flickered violently.
Up close, it looked less like machinery and more like something grown—layers of alloy wrapped around a glowing core that pulsed like a heartbeat trying not to fail.
Jace placed his hand against the outer casing.
Instantly, his wrist console spiked with error readings.
UNSTABLE GRAVITIC FEED
CORE SYNC FAILURE
UNAUTHORIZED ENERGY REDIRECTION DETECTED
His stomach tightened.
“That’s impossible…”
The anchor pulsed again.
Harder.
And for a split second, the gravity in the bay shifted.
Loose tools lifted off the ground.
Dust rose upward.
Jace himself felt weightless.
Then everything snapped back down violently, slamming him into the platform.
“Okay,” he gasped, pushing himself up. “That’s definitely new.”
The drone descended closer.
“Step away from the core.”
Jace didn’t move.
Because now he could see it.
A fracture inside the gravity anchor.
Not mechanical failure.
Something inside it was being redirected.
Like someone—something—was siphoning the city’s gravity from the inside out.
And doing it deliberately.
A second alarm triggered.
Then a third.
Across the engine bay, other anchors began to flicker in response.
Jace’s eyes widened.
“No, no, no—don’t cascade—”
Too late.
The entire bay shuddered as multiple gravity cores destabilized at once. The air itself felt wrong, like the city had briefly forgotten which direction was down.
A crate lifted off the floor and slammed into the ceiling.
The drone fired a stabilization pulse.
It didn’t help.
Jace grabbed his tool kit and sprinted toward the control bridge.
“Override system—manual lock—come on, come on…”
His fingers flew across the interface, bypassing authorization layers he technically wasn’t allowed to touch.
The system hesitated.
Then rejected him.
ACCESS DENIED
Jace cursed under his breath.
Then he saw it.
A second signal buried beneath the denial.
Hidden.
Not system error.
Not malfunction.
A line of code actively rewriting the gravity balance in real time.
Someone was inside Meridian Sky’s core network.
The entire structure shook again.
This time, longer.
Stronger.
Far below, entire sections of the city began to drift out of alignment. Lights flickered in distant habitation rings. Emergency stabilizers fired in bursts that sounded like dying thunder.
The drone turned sharply.
“Evacuation protocol initiated.”
Jace stared at the core readings.
“This isn’t evacuation,” he whispered.
Then, quieter:
“This is sabotage.”
A new transmission appeared on his console.
No sender ID.
Just a single line:
THE SKY IS NOT STABLE. IT IS CONTROLLED.
Jace froze.
Then the message changed.
AND IT IS BEING RELEASED.
The gravity anchor beside him pulsed one last time.
And somewhere deep inside Meridian Sky, something vast and unseen began to shift.
Not collapsing.
Not breaking.
.The Ashes of Meridian Sky — Half Chapter 2: The Signal Below
The warning systems didn’t stop.
They multiplied.
Jace stood in the control bay as red alerts stacked across every available screen,
