Cloudworld Stories

Above an endless sea of clouds, humanity has built a world that was never meant to touch the ground. Altair Academy stands at the heart of this civilization-a place where students learn to preserve the fragile world their ancestors built through biotechnology, sustainable systems, and one guiding principle: there is no waste to waste. For Zoe, the clouds have always been home. The world below them is spoken of only in fragments, buried beneath old records and warnings no one questions anymore. Then there is the Vortex. A vast spiral in the cloud sea, surrounded by strange electromagnetic disturbances and powerful enough to disrupt the technology around it. Most people see it as a natural phenomenon. Zoe isn't so sure. When she and Caiden are given the opportunity to descend through it, curiosity becomes something far more dangerous. Because beneath the clouds is not empty space. There is another world. An abandoned one. Because beneath the clouds is something no one at Altair Academy was prepared to find. And the deeper they go, the more they discover that the history they were taught may have been carefully preserved-and carefully altered. "What if we're not supposed to go down there?" Zoe asked. Caiden looked toward the dark center of the Vortex. "Then why build a world that makes us curious enough to try?" She glanced at him. "That's not an answer." "No," he said. "But it's the reason I'm going." Some truths lie beyond the clouds. And sometimes, discovering the truth means deciding what deserves to survive.

Coming soon, whenever I have time, so cross your fingers, whoever is reading this.