Sky Era

Glides along the cold blue layer where the air thins and decisions become cheap. The word predator is half a courtesy here — there is nothing at this altitude to hunt, only currents to negotiate with. The shape stays narrow because the wind rewards narrowness, and the eyes have learned to read the sky the way other creatures read the ground.

A watcher set against the red end of the day, when the sky becomes harder to read and small mistakes become irreversible. The role is patient: hold position, wait for whatever the dusk decides to push up through the cloud, and decide later if it was worth noticing. Most of the work is in not blinking at the wrong colour.

A gate cut through the wall of a green storm. From a distance the doorway looks navigable; up close, it stops looking like a doorway and starts looking like an opinion. Whatever passes through it does not return on the same vector, and pilots who survive the crossing tend to refuse to describe what they saw on the other side.

Announces a season nobody asked for. The herald arrives early, by the rules of this era, with a coat already prepared for weather the lower altitudes have not yet started to notice. Speaks rarely; the costume is the announcement, and any further explanation would only delay the change it has come to deliver.

Walks a road built out of clouds. The titan was always going to be too large for the lower roads, and here the architecture finally fits — shoulders that fill the lane, a stride the weather has agreed to support. From below, on a clear day, you can sometimes hear the road being pressed flat by the passage.

A cave hollowed into the underside of winter. From outside it reads as architecture; from inside, as a creature that has agreed, for now, to remain open. It is difficult to tell whether the cave shelters travellers or simply collects them, and most travellers, by the time they care about the difference, have already gone in.