Tag Archives: fiction

The Quiet Flame

A short story in three parts

Part Two: Maen

As we know, on the planet Orilen, there were no fossil fuels.

Not because the Orileni were wise – at least, not at first – but because their world left no remnants of the past buried deep enough to rot into fire. No coal seams. No oil fields. No gas pockets. The dead returned to the living in days, not eons.

They learned to live by the rhythms of their world: wind that pulsed, sun that danced, rivers that hummed. They shaped tools from light, built cities with air, and stored energy in coiled stone and magnetic webs.

In the seaside city of Naren-Kai, a ten-cycle-old child named Maen wandered through the spirals of her learning pod.

She was small and sharp-eyed, obsessed with broken things. While others her age sketched star-birds and coded wind poems, Maen pried open old wave turbines and rewired defunct gliders. She had questions, always questions.

One day, she found something forbidden.

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The Quiet Flame

A short story in three parts

Part One: Serin

On the planet Orilen, there were no fossil fuels.

Not because the Orileni were wise; they simply had no choice. Their world, with its warm sapphire seas and forests of silver-needled trees, had never entombed the dead for long. Microbial life broke down the past too quickly; pressure was never right; time never still. So no coal. No oil. No gas.

For millennia, fire was a whisper. The Orileni learned to shape metal with solar furnaces made of polished obsidian and liquid lenses. Their first machines were spun by water and air, stored in stone chambers pressurised like lungs. Homes were heated not by combustion but by deep pipes sunk into the planet’s breath: geothermal warmth, constant and quiet.

Children grew up knowing the sun’s arc as intimately as their own heartbeat. Energy was not something hoarded or burned: it was something borrowed for a time.

The ‘Great Shift’ began not with an explosion, but a question.

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