Kestrel House

 There have been portals to the Fae realm for at least as long as humans have had fairy tales, but the first one deliberately engineered by humans was opened in an abandoned amusement park thirty-five miles northeast of Antiphony. The historic event was observed from a safe distance by a team of army engineers, with military reinforcements on standby in case anything went wrong. It was also observed from a significantly closer vantage point by Jolene Kestrel, who absolutely should not have been in the park that day.

Jolene was by far the most promising student at Costa Nova University’s prestigious School of Architecture, Class of 2056. She’d entered the park shortly after dawn, illegally, through a hole in the rusty chain-link fence. For several hours—hyperfocused on her work and utterly unaware of what was about to unfold—she sat in a dilapidated bumper car and sketched endless variations on the ivy-covered steel curves of the largest roller coaster in the park, searching for the seeds of an architectural innovation that could someday be the cornerstone of her legacy.

As she started her seventh sketch, having abandoned the first six as uninspired and overly predictable, Jolene was startled by a loud hiss of static. A shimmering column of light rose up from the concrete in the overgrown parking lot behind the roller coaster. Glowing brighter, the column split into two parallel lines, moving away from each other to reveal an otherworldly place, an inhuman city. Her view of the portal was partially blocked by the steel frame of the coaster, but she dared not move. Even so, what little she could see took her breath away.

Architecturally, the city was a sophisticated embodiment of the ideas that Jolene had been grasping for, a seamless blend of geometric and natural forms. At its core was a circle of majestic evergreens—taller than any tree Jolene had ever seen, even in the redwood forests of northern California—each one wrapped in ribbons of giant honeycomb. Scattered at the base of the trees were semi-translucent domes, like massive soap bubbles, shimmering with rainbow opalescence. Greenhouses, perhaps.

The edges of the portal dimmed, blurring into the surrounding sky. Jolene sketched frantically, determined to capture the incredible scene before it vanished. She drew a rough outline of the city, and as she started filling in the details, a swarm of flying creatures emerged from the ring of trees. They flew towards her, hurrying to reach the fading portal. Only one made it through. It was an uncanny cross between an angel and a giant insect, a vaguely humanoid wasp.

Thunderous noise and a fierce wind heralded the arrival of half a dozen military helicopters. They converged on the lone intruder, forcing it to land in the overgrown lot. Jolene waited, not moving and barely daring to breathe, as the creature from the other side of the portal was captured, loaded into one of the helicopters, and carried away, escorted by four of the remaining choppers. The soldiers from the last helicopter did a thorough sweep of the parking lot before they, too, got back in their chopper and flew away.

Jolene huddled in her dilapidated bumper car long after they departed, certain she should not have witnessed any portion of that sequence of events and terrified she’d be caught. It was only as the sun dipped low on the horizon that the threat of darkness impelled her to move. Her car was about half a mile away, in a grassy lot that had once sold overflow parking for the amusement park but was now only occasionally used for farmers markets and swap meets. She was relieved the car was still there, and that no one else was around.

On the drive back to Antiphony, she checked her rearview mirror repeatedly, expecting that she’d be followed, stopped, arrested, abducted…something…but the drive was uneventful. Safely back in her apartment, she reflected on everything she’d seen, her fear gradually replaced by the spark of inspiration.

This beautiful vision might be enough to finally get her out of her father’s shadow, not that she wasn’t grateful for his expertise and guidance, of course. Some of her fondest childhood memories were of the summer she got to help him sculpt the second-story addition to the family house, pressing the synthetic wood into elegant curves and drawing colorful abstract designs for the freeform windows. But he was famous in his own right, and if people knew of her at all, it was only as his daughter.

She stayed up all night and sketched the plans for a simple but elegant human habitation inspired by the strange city she’d glimpsed on the far side of the portal. She started from a loosely Victorian style, with a trio of turrets in slightly varied heights, like trees in a forest. Instead of using honeycomb as a textural element, she incorporated a feather motif—primarily for the rooftops but in places cascading down in patterns evocative of wings. She labeled the plans Kestrel House, partly for herself but also for the falcon that shared her name. It would be a marvel of technology, an homage to nature, an unrivaled work of art that would set in motion a new architectural movement. Her legacy.

In the morning, Jolene’s roommate saw the sketches, and—offhandedly, not meaning to cause any trouble—mentioned them to her brother, who unfortunately happened to be a military officer involved with the project that had opened the portal to the Fae realm.

Jolene’s plans and all her sketches were seized and marked as classified. She was given strict orders not to recreate them, or to use anything she’d seen through the portal in any way. Months passed, and she grew bitter and frustrated, unable to use her best ideas and unwilling to move on and come up with something new.

When the war started, she enlisted. She fought bravely, believing that if the war was ended quickly, the Fae would no longer be considered a threat and her architectural sketches could be released.

Instead, she was killed in a brutal ambush attack.

Kestrel House was never constructed. On July 22nd, 2064, seven years to the day after Jolene died, her sketches were declassified and put on display in the National Museum of History.

The Forever-Stunted Hive of Vyvv

Mushrooms, like so many things, were both a blessing and a curse. Fairy circles purified the soil, absorbing iron and thereby detoxifying the Fae Realm. A blessing. But few outside the highest-ranking queens realized that it was not the Fae but the mushrooms themselves that found the human world and established a link. The exact same trait that made them valuable could very well bring about the downfall of the Fae: mushrooms were drawn to iron, and the human world was rich with it. A curse.

Portals have long been commonplace, and even the ones the humans opened were not so different from fairy circles, despite their angular appearance and the utter lack of mushrooms. Not so with rifts.

It was humans who created the first rift, several months into the war. The time-seer queens named it Harbinger Rift. Anchored to the ground on either end by a portal, the rift arched high into the sky and was vaster even than the triad hive of Queensbirth. The rift-torn sky shone so brightly it disrupted the grand migration of the hatchlings, who confused it for the moon.

Vyvv had the extreme misfortune of having started her hive directly underneath Harbinger Rift. It hadn’t yet existed when she’d planted her hivetrees, of course, but the rift now loomed over her meticulously planted saplings. A portal was merely an opening, allowing things to pass through but keeping the worlds fundamentally separated. But the rules of the rift were different: things that were not meant to be blended became so, and the magic of the Realm leaked out into the human world. Magic that Vyvv sorely needed for her hive. Her trees were stunted, unable to grow beyond Earthly heights, too small to support a proper honeycomb.

A few workers buzzed about, pruning stray branches and feeding them to giant snails that crept around in gradually ascending spirals from the forest floor, leaving behind slime trails that hardened into shimmering greenhouse domes. But only a few workers, where there should have been thousands. Vyvv should have sent the last of them away, and driven the snails off into the wilds, but no other hive would have them and she couldn’t bear to forsake those few that wished to stay. As an Architect Queen, she was bound to this land and all that grew upon it, trapped here in a hive that could never be completed.

The failure was all the more heartbreaking because the birthing clay here was particularly rich with ancestral wisdom, this valley having long been a place of dissolution. Countless queens and soldiers had been laid to rest here, that they might be absorbed into the clay of the next generation, a lineage that stretched back through the ages long before the war, back to the days of intermittent early contact with humans far more easily managed than those of this modern era. Vyvv’s own incubation cell, centuries ago in the honeycomb of a distant hive, had been sealed with clay painstakingly carried from this valley, an honor once reserved only for the highest-ranking queens.

When the time-seer queens gathered, the outcomes they saw for the war were dire. Vyvv had chosen the location of her hive thinking, in desperation, that she could spread the wisdom of the valley’s clay more widely. Queens, soldiers, workers. All should know the horrors of the enemy they faced.

It would have been a solid strategy, had not the humans opened the rift in this specific place.

Hives were meant to be passed along through generations, with individual trees dying and new seedlings planted in the same configuration to replace what was lost, dynamic but enduring. It took the work of many individuals to accomplish such a feat, and Vyvv could not attract a royal court—or even a single lowly mate—unless she could grow a proper hive. An impossible task. Her saplings barely spoke and never sang, their voices dulled just as their physical growth was stunted.

She could hear new whispers, though, from the far side of the rift. The magic there was thin and tenuous, but earthly trees found their voices for the first time. Humans, for all their elaborate security measures, paid no mind to plants, which meant trees were ideal as spies. Enough magic had seeped through the rift that Vyvv could train the forest on the far side to listen, and she enchanted earthside birds to fly across the rift and sing to her of what the trees had learned.

If Vyvv could not finish her hive, perhaps she could at least entice a war queen to join her royal court by learning the secrets of their enemy.

The birds proved useful as messengers within the Realm as well. Vyvv was sorely lacking in workers, but she could send these tiny creatures off to the war queens with tidbits of useful information and an invitation to visit her here and learn more. She sent dozens of invitations—not just to the war queens but to the civic, spell-weaver, and scholar queens as well—but Zzav was the only one who came. The war queen arrived with a phalanx of soldiers flying in tight formation behind her as she approached the city, their iridescent exoskeletons glistening in the sunlight. When she landed within the circle of undersized trees, her soldiers dispersed to form a perimeter guard, distributing themselves such that the bulk of the soldiers were between the hive and the rift.

Vyvv told the stately war queen everything she’d learned—technologies and weapons, terrifying strategies designed not for combat but for annihilation. Zzav took it all in, solemn, and at the end declared that Vyvv’s hive could not be saved from such an onslaught. For the good of the Realm, retreat and consolidation of resources were vital. Zzav released the bindings that held Vyvv to the land and ordered her to flee and hide in the mountains.

Without a hive, Vyvv lost all standing, a wandering Architect Queen without a royal court. But her duty was to the Realm, and if her purpose was to serve as a warning, to show the dangers of their enemy, so be it. She used what little magic she could summon in this wretched place to enchant her stunted hive: it would be forever preserved in this unfinished state. Any who looked upon it could draw on their anger at the humans’ treachery and use that rage to fuel their fight.

With nothing more to do, she flew to the meditation caves, high in the northern mountains, and carved herself a burrow in the heart of the rock. The time-seer queens recognized her sacrifice and encased her in a bubble where time itself moved slower. There she could sleep for hundreds, even thousands of years, until such time as she might once again be needed.

The Fae-Cursed Officers’ Barracks

At the top of Prospect Hill, overlooking Rift 17NW001, are the Fae-cursed officers’ barracks. In the early stages of construction, there was nothing remarkable about the building: poured concrete foundation, the beginnings of a red brick exterior. Large enough to be imposing, but no more so than hundreds of other military or government buildings.

Sergeant Major Shriver was in charge of the project, which had gone smoothly…up until the swarm incursion. On the morning of Invasion Day, he was up early to inspect the previous day’s work. So he was there on site as thousands of Fae soldiers poured through the rift in swarms so dense they blocked the sun like storm clouds.

He got on comms immediately to warn of the attack, but shutting the rift down without destroying it was a process that took several hours. The shutdown sequence was never even initiated; it was deemed too late since the enemy was already through. Previous engagements had shown that the Fae considered their soldiers expendable. Once on this side of the rift they continued pursuing their objectives until they perished.

The swarm targeted transportation and infrastructure—roads, tracks, power stations—all damaging attacks but nothing overly alarming. Then the Fae did something unexpected: they began to retreat. Hidden among the hordes of soldiers were a handful of queens, and as they returned through the rift they cast an attack that altered the electromagnetic field for miles around, setting it churning as if they’d unleashed an ongoing series of nuclear explosions, but without any trace of bombs or radiation.

The unfinished barracks had been left largely untouched.

With the surrounding infrastructure thoroughly destroyed, and Prospect Hill unreachable by ground or air, the barracks became both strategically and symbolically important to the war effort, a key location for retaking the rift. Sergeant Major Shriver was given orders to complete construction by any means necessary, on an accelerated timeline, so that military scientists could be stationed on site to study the ongoing, devastating alterations to the electromagnetic field surrounding the rift and—hopefully—find some way to counteract it.

Desperate for building materials, Sergeant Major Shriver authorized the production of bricks using clay gathered locally from the valley surrounding the rift. Soldiers had strict orders to remain on the human side, but unlike portals that had clearly delineated divisions between worlds, with the rift, any such lines were blurred, and worse, the boundaries now undulated with the ever-shifting electromagnetic field.

Clay from the Fae side of the rift became brick for the barracks.

Angered by the theft of sacred earth, and empowered by her link to the stolen clay, one of the Fae—later determined to be a high-ranking war queen known as Zzav—cursed the barracks thusly, in words that sprung unbidden into the minds of those who crossed the entry threshold: “In the moment this building is finished, all humans who have looked upon it shall perish.”

Historians now believe that the goal of the curse was to make humans abandon construction while the building was as yet unfinished, thereby forcing them to cede valuable territory to advancing Fae armies. However, curses have a way of not going as intended, and amidst concerns that any static state might be considered “finished,” the humans instead decided that the Officers’ Barracks would remain endlessly under construction.

Curses care not for technicalities, so Sergeant Major Shriver gathered some of humankind’s best military minds and set them to the task of determining what it meant for a building to be unfinished. They were instructed to err on the side of caution, and those among them who had seen the building either in person or even in photographs were, of course, highly motivated to take a conservative view.

The building could never be fully enclosed, the committee decided. There must always be at least one section of exterior wall that was incomplete and also a portion of roof left open. Construction would be continuous, obviously, but at what rate did it need to proceed? Prior to convening the advisory committee, construction had ceased overnight without triggering the curse, but beyond that there was no useful data. Must a certain rate of progress be made, or some specific number of hours completed each week, or month, or year?

Questions of schedule unresolved, construction nonetheless pressed forward. A long corridor was built, winding between supply depots and around the northeast guard tower, down the hillside until it was a stone’s throw away from the creek that ran through the valley. The corridor ended in a staircase that went up to what had once been the roof, but which then became the slanted ceramic-tile floor of a second story hallway, complete with a series of doors that opened to nowhere.

The war continued poorly, and numerous soldiers had to be stationed at Prospect Hill to defend humanity from Fae attacks coming in through the rift. Morale amongst the soldiers was, understandably, extremely low.

Months passed, and the second floor of the hillside corridor was connected—partially—to the main structure of the barracks. The construction committee then decided that one of the corridor’s doorways, rather than opening into nowhere, should have a set of stairs back down to ground level. Excavations began for a bunker room at the base of the stairs, cutting deep into the hill. The bunker could not be left open, so another of the corridor’s doorways became the starting point for a two-story dining hall…unusable in the winter because the east wall was only half constructed and the southwest corner held a spiral staircase that wound upwards through a gaping hole in the roof.

Construction continued in this manner for many years, despite occasional skirmishes that happened nearby, until three months before the end of the war, when the Fae gathered their resources for a series of desperate attacks. They altered the flow of time in the sky around the rift into a chaos of accelerated and decelerated streams. The barracks were annihilated by a hundred years of storms compressed into a span of seventeen minutes, leaving behind only the bunker, the foundation, and a few small fragments of the original walls.

Sergeant Major Shriver had remained in the hillside bunker during and after the devastating attack. Even before the debris had settled, he was out digging bricks from the rubble and stacking them atop the foundation where walls had once been, ensuring that construction continued until the evacuated construction crews were able to return.

Anything even remotely structurally sound after the attack was preserved. Uncertain as to whether reconstructing damaged areas was sufficient to stave off the consequences of the curse, two construction teams worked in parallel, one team rebuilding the structure that was destroyed, as close to the original layout as could be managed, and the other pressing forward with the building’s expansion.

In the post-war era, it has been proposed that the curse might be rendered harmless—or nearly so—by blocking the barracks from view, destroying all photographs, and having all those who continue the construction work be blindfolded. When no one alive had looked upon the structure, it could be completed, and the curse might then be ended. But what if, in some distant future, the barracks were repaired, repurposed, or renovated…by people who believed the curse no longer applied, or who had forgotten the history of the building entirely?

Finished is a temporary state, ephemeral, always subject to the whims of those who come after us. Unfinished, however, is eternal.

The Final Uncorrupted Hive

Ajha held the memories of many types of queen: architect, spell-weaver, scholar, civic, time-seer, war…but she herself was none of these. She was a new kind of queen, destined someday to be the Queen.

Before the war, nineteen of twenty time-seer queens had warned of human attacks that could not be countered, a triumph of technology over magic. Along with the council of the scholars, the civic queens had done their best to prepare for a horrific attack, and it was out of desperation that Ajha was created, in the midst of war.

To have the knowledge of so many kinds of queen had always been forbidden, too much power consolidated into a single being. Ajha could sense both future and past, understood the shape and workings of the hives, commanded workers and soldiers, and shifted forces of nature with her spells.

Even with such unprecedented power, she could not stop the humans.

They’d found a way to counteract the defensive spells around the rift, tamed the electromagnetic fields and mapped the churning time eddies so that they could fly warplanes into the Realm itself. She had no choice but to retreat.

Ajha went to the meditation caves, in the mountain where the legendary architect queen, Vyvv, had gone to hide near the start of the war. The exiled queen was still there, with a small cadre of loyal workers who, judging from the spells that surrounded them, had joined their queen sometime after she’d entered hibernation. Ajha did not wake the lesser queen from hibernation, but instead sealed herself in alongside her, stretching Vyvv’s original bubble of slow-time to encase them all. From this place of relative safety, she cast a far-seeing spell and watched the war unfold across the Realm.

Bombs fell from planes like fat raindrops in a thunderstorm, destroying not only hives but fields and coastlines. The humans considered this acceptable warfare, even congratulated themselves on their restraint in not using nuclear weaponry. The bombings did considerable damage to the hives, but despite the dire prophecies burned into her memories, Ajha clung to hope that the hives would somehow be regrown, the damage healed with time.

But time, alas, was not so kind. Ajha could do nothing but watch as the queens of the Realm became erratic. The architect queens set workers to the task of rebuilding the hives, but the structures were increasingly unstable. The humans must have believed the changes were strategic, or perhaps they feared retaliation from an enemy only defeated and not entirely destroyed. They sent another wave of planes, the second attack more widespread than the first. The honeycomb of hives rebuilt after the first wave was unsound, and nearly all of it was destroyed in the second bombing. Replacements were hastily constructed after the second wave, but these were even worse, prone to spontaneous collapse. It was as if the architect queens had forgotten how to build.

It took Ajha far longer than it should have to realize the problem, for humans had never before committed atrocities on this scale against the Fae. But there had long been legends and stories of humans using iron against those who ventured through the portals, and now they had done the unthinkable and poisoned the entire Realm with it. There were no scholar queens left that were rational enough to debate the merits of her theory, but Ajha suspected that the bomb casings had high iron content, and fragments of bombs were everywhere, their poison leaching into the water and spreading throughout the Realm. Mushrooms and forest snails would eventually absorb it and break it down, but at this level of contamination it would take aeons.

In the depths of her memory, Ajha found hazy recollections of a long-abandoned hive, on an island so far into the great ocean that it cannot be reached by flight, even by the strongest of queens. She left Vyvv in hibernation, safe within a slow-time bubble deep inside the mountain, but woke a few of the workers. She commanded them to build her a boat.

It was finished in a day and a night, and she immediately set sail, having had no food and only the water she’d brought with her from the uncontaminated mountain spring inside her slow-time bubble. She thanked the workers that built her boat but had to leave them behind to face their fates against the iron—she did not have sufficient water for them all to make the journey. Instead she loaded the ship with mushroom spores and the eggs of forest snails, enough—she hoped—to keep the island pure.

After many days at sea, she reached the island and found the last uncorrupted hive, empty and in need of light repair, but otherwise sound. Isolated and long abandoned, it had been neither bombed nor altered by iron-addled Fae. Ajha slowed time around her island and sped it up in the rest of the Realm.

She bore witness to the end of the Fae and settled in to wait.

Someday, she would be the Queen that gave them a new beginning. Until then, she toiled as though she was a lowly worker, preserving this final uncorrupted hive against the slow erosion of entropy, a task which, like the hive itself, was never finished.

Mourning House

After humankind declared victory in the war against the Fae, Antiphony became a tourist site for all things war-related, advertising itself as the place where everything started. Museums sprang up everywhere, and scattered among them were statues and memorials, small sacred spaces for people to pay their respects.

Costa Nova University sold guided tours of Jolene Kestrel’s apartment in the student housing complex and erected a statue of her near the entrance to the architecture building, but neither of those sites were as popular as the recreation of her childhood home. Designed and built by Jolene’s father, Thomas Kestrel, the original house was sometimes described as harmoniously discordant, a haphazard blend of Neo-century Sculpturism with clean geometric elements from the far older Prairie School. Most of the later embellishments were a collaborative effort between the architectural legend and his daughter, a rising star whose life was cut tragically short by the war.

Mourning House was an art installation funded by the city of Antiphony, designed by Thomas Kestrel himself, and dedicated to the memory of his daughter. It was a detailed replica of their quirky family home, from the sharp angles of its bleached-white concrete base to the undulating synth-wood of the entryway and upper floor additions. A gaping hole—roughly three feet in diameter, with jagged edges—ran through the entire structure, from front to back, cutting through exterior and interior walls, furniture, wall hangings, even a section of pipes to the downstairs bathroom sink.

For a time, the house remained that way, vulnerable to the elements, with damage clearly visible even from across the street. After several weeks, Thomas Kestrel returned to the house with a giant sheet of printed cardstock, a square of paper large enough to cover, barely, the opening in the exterior wall. He carefully installed the paper to conceal the damage to the front of the house, and it matched the exterior details so exactly that even standing up close the building looked intact, save for the faintly visible line of the paper’s edge.

The back of the paper wasn’t printed, however, and the ragged edges of the hole were clearly visible to anyone touring the inside of the house. The blank sheet that separated the room from the outside was thin enough that on sunny days the light shone through, and in rainstorms it disintegrated and had to be replaced. The gaping voids that snaked through the interior walls and into the heart of the house were left untouched.

At noon, on the 22nd day of every month, Thomas Kestrel stood outside the house and punched through the printed-paper wall. At night, he returned and replaced the torn paper with a freshly printed sheet.

Visitors to the house left flowers, often placing them in gaps inside the house. At the end of each day, caretakers cleared them away. Visitors were invited to touch the paper-thin exterior wall, and while most were gentle and reverent, some tore the fragile paper, usually by accident but sometimes deliberately, exposing the void that was always there.

After many months had passed, Thomas Kestrel changed the covering of the exterior wall from paper to thin plywood, lightly carved and carefully painted to match the surrounding house. On the interior side of the plywood, he painted the view outside, in abstract, with details lost and a muted color palette. He did not punch through the plywood every month, but once or twice a year—seemingly at random—he came out with a sledgehammer and smashed it.

He never filled the holes inside the house, but as the years went by he smoothed the jagged edges. He replaced the pipes that went to the bathroom sink but left the gaping hole around them. Sometimes he went inside and sat in the armchair with a semi-circle missing from the back.

In one of his last interviews, Thomas Kestrel talked about the various iterations of the house. He said that his grief, like Mourning House itself, was never finished, it simply changed with time.

The Stowaway Hive

While Vyvv slept, the world had changed.

She barely recognized the Realm, and the only other remaining queen was Ajha, the strange and powerful Queen who had awakened Vyvv from hibernation. Vyvv found her simultaneously impressive and terrifying. Ajha sent her on a series of scouting missions so that Vyvv could see the human intrusions that now spread well beyond the rift. The hives she once knew had all been utterly destroyed.

If all went according to plan, the next time Vyvv slept, she’d wake to an even bigger change.

The humans were building a generation ship to travel between the stars, with giant holds for any Earthly species they would need, in space and at their final destination. Countless plants and animals to live and travel alongside them; many times more than that as seeds, eggs, or embryos; and many times more again stored digitally as a backup to be bio-printed upon arrival, in case other strategies failed. They’d even developed rudimentary slow-time bubbles that they called stasis fields, to allow a handful of humans to sleep for the entire journey.

Humans have always carried other species with them on their ships, knowingly and otherwise. They brought beasts of burden and creatures of comfort, pests and parasites. The lunar colony was infested with geckos, but no one could say for sure how any of them got there.

For their generation ship, they’d taken precautions against a wide range of unwanted species, but, believing the Fae completely extinct, they hadn’t guarded against that specific threat. They were, in fact, quite careless in this regard, constructing the ship with lightweight aluminum alloys that were nearly devoid of iron. They even selected a building site in geosynchronous orbit over one of the lesser rifts because the flow of time moved more quickly there. The investors were a selfish and impatient lot, eager to be part of the first generation to set off on this historic journey. Humans had in their societies a hierarchy that Vyvv found not unlike Fae hives: short-lived workers lost to obscurity with the passage of time while a select few lived on.

The night sky on both sides of the rift swirled with vibrant streaks of aurora. The generation ship was a dot of light above it, slightly brighter than the surrounding stars. Here, where the Realm seeped out and the Earthly rules were diluted, Vyvv could cast spells to aid her mission. Using strategies based on the intelligence trees had gathered during the war and beyond, she created a space in the heart of the ship that humans simply forgot. It was a vast ship with mazes of corridors between the chambers, so it wasn’t difficult to alter the maps and cast enchantments to deflect attention.

She snuck workers from her entourage onto human shuttles to get them onboard the ship. They worked tirelessly to create a honeycomb structure on the walls of their hidden chamber, because even with Ajha’s help they’d been unable to come up with a plan that let them hide full-grown hivetrees. When construction was nearly complete, she and her workers scoured the Realm and gathered the rest of what was needed, from seeds of trees to eggs of giant snails.

Mating and egg laying were usually done by a court of queens together, but Vyvv had no such cohort, only Ajha. They were the last surviving queens, so the work of creating the next generation fell entirely on them. Each laid thousands upon thousands of eggs, more than any queen in recorded history, enough to fill every cell in the honeycomb-lined chamber of the generation ship.

Afterwards, Ajha returned to the planet to try and rebuild the Realm, determined that the Fae should have two chances at surviving.

Vyvv, in her final act before her second sleep, slowed time inside her stowaway hive, bringing it nearly to a stop. She was so very tired, but her work was not yet finished. Her eggs would hatch when the generation ship reached its destination, and together she and her offspring would transform everything they’d brought with them into a new beginning, a second Realm of Fae.

The Human-Fae War Museum at the End of Time

Humans, being rather obsessed with legacy, devised a way to create a museum that would last to the dying days of the universe. They built it in Antiphony. The timespan of the museum’s existence was an unprecedented feat of architecture at the grandest scale, relying on a series of nested stasis fields. It was a technique long believed to be impossible because the patterns of interference between two fields caused catastrophic instabilities.

Prominent 31st-century physicist Maria Wu was the one who made the necessary breakthrough, combining her knowledge of traditional human physics with research on the mechanics of Fae time bubbles. Dr. Wu discovered that by alternating stasis fields and time bubbles, the interference patterns were rendered harmless by time dilation effects—allowing for the creation of a small pocket of space that would last until the end of the universe.

The Human-Fae War Museum was built inside a Fae bubble of slow time, nested within a stasis field the size of a city, all inside a bubble that encompassed nearly the entire continent (which in turn was enclosed within a stasis field that held all of Earth, inside a slow-time bubble large enough to hold the solar system), and so on, to a number of layers calculated—correctly!—by intelligence unit 6b17, such that the star around which Earth orbited would be at the end of its white dwarf stage when the solar system re-entered the timestream of the universe, allowing the sun to die in sync with the heat death of the universe itself.

Likewise, the stasis field surrounding planet Earth would fail even later, having been encased within the slower-flowing timestream of the solar system for much of its existence, and so the planet, too, would exist until the end, powered by nuclear plants since its sun would have faded too far to be a useful source of energy.

The entire undertaking was a true marvel of engineering, and Maria Wu was there to see it come to fruition, having nested herself in the innermost of bubbles, trusting the outside world to finish executing her grand vision. Dr. Wu was not alone in this, hundreds of others—some a part of the initial project and others from later generations—timed their nested stasis bubbles to pop at the end of the universe.

They woke to a night sky devoid of stars.

The world was strangely small; the city of Antiphony was a drop of light in a vast ocean of darkness. Many who had worked so hard to reach the end of time were unsure of what to do, now that they had reached it. The Human-Fae War Museum was immensely popular. From here, the only direction to look was backwards.

The museum was housed in an imposing eight-story structure that occupied five square blocks in the heart of Antiphony, with exterior walls decorated in tile-mosaic murals depicting scenes from both the human world and the Fae realm, making use of angled tiles and forced perspective, and any number of other tricks to create an entirely different viewing experience depending on the distance and position of the viewer. The mural included several major battles, of course, but also quieter moments: a young Jolene Kestrel sculpting synth-wood with her father, a giant snail building a Fae greenhouse bubble, a visitor leaving a bouquet of lilacs in the void at the center of Mourning House, Dr. Maria Wu celebrating the first successful test of nested stasis fields.

The entrance to the museum was designed to look like the early human-engineered portals—a column of light that parted into two bright parallel lines, allowing visitors to step inside. The vast, open interior of the building held exhibits both human and Fae, divided down the center by a simulated Harbinger Rift.

Thomas Kestrel’s Mourning House was part of the museum, along with the entire neighborhood that it had occupied, but the house was no longer a dynamic exhibit. Kestrel himself had died countless centuries earlier. Instead of carved plywood or printed paper, the missing piece of the front exterior wall was covered by a framed print of Jolene’s sketches of Kestrel House.

Nearby, on an otherwise bare section of the museum’s exterior wall, was a small placard describing the (unpictured, for obvious reasons) Cursed Officers’ Barracks of Prospect Hill. Located outside the innermost slow-time bubble and stasis field, the barracks were no longer under construction. The structure had long since crumbled into dust, and all those who’d ever looked upon it had died…but there was no way to reconstruct, this far beyond that moment, whether those two things were related.

In one of her last acts as Queen, Ajha had the final uncorrupted hive moved from the Realm to the human world and insisted that it be included in the war museum. She could not abide the thought of humans erasing what the Fae had built. There had been other hives after that one anyway, both on Earth and elsewhere. She had no need to keep it.

Philosophers sometimes suggested that the uncorrupted hive, preserved in the Human-Fae War Museum, was the sole example of finished architecture from the war and post-war periods, but constant restoration efforts were needed to keep the hive unchanged in the face of entropy, even in a stream of time so relatively slow as this one.

The claim that anything is ever finished remains, at best, contentious.

 

(Editors’ Note: “Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 64A.)

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