I of the Storm: Lower Heaven, Episode One

By Benjamin Loomis

Twelve score and four years ago, the Founders crash-landed in a new world. Fleeing the war-ravaged Old Continent, these brave refugees built a city on the principles of Merit, Logic, and Freedom. They named this new place Heaven.

Two centuries later, Heaven’s on the verge. The city swells with people, solar shortages and food panics rule the day. The City Corps polices the streets with high-tech magic, while the Wizard government mandates top-down solutions from their lofty glass pyramids.

And beyond the lake-wall, hunters chase magical storms that transform beasts and shatter the human brain, risking sanity for a chance to make their fortune.

Felix and Vic would be happy to make their rent. The two roommates struggle for a place in a city with no room for them, trying to get ahead, without being crushed beneath the Founders' dream for a better world.

Lower Heaven is a five-part serial novel exploring cultural myths and realities in a speculative, millennial, solarpunk, universe, the debut work of Benjamin Loomis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Benjamin Loomis
• Release date: Mar 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463431450

Benjamin Loomis

Benjamin Loomis (hi!) is a debut author with deep premonitions about the future's trajectory.My personal theory of change revolves around creating community-controlled alternatives to harmful institution at the local/city level. Spending my childhood as an army brat living all across the US and Europe has left me with no hometown but a bunch of fun dark perspectives.Day job-wise I work freelance in Portland for local nonprofits, and write weird heady fiction in my spare time.My debut novel is called Lower Heaven. It's a five-part solarpunk action and adventure serial delving into the zeitgeist of a fictional city on the verge of collapse, or revolution, or something- definitely something. Find out for yourself, the first episode is available through Smashwords retailers and in print online!

Book preview

Lower Heaven

Episode One:

I of the Storm

By Benjamin Loomis

© 2019 Benjamin Loomis

Viva la!

Lets git it.

I

In the month of Fervidor, Heaven was at a crossroad. The last weeks of the wet season put the skies in a tirade, as winds from the Poison Sea slammed into the humid wall that rose from the jungle, with Heaven on its lake-isle caught between. The winds, wet, and rising heat whipped snakepox and other epidemics through the city and gave the month its name, and going on six muggy moons soaking in the Valley’s low-grade monsoon, everything moved like a fly in a web.

The Zuri, the jungle’s people, didn’t call this time of year Fervidor. The Zuri calendar had only 260 days, it didn’t follow the seasons. In fact, the day that was today, the 22nd of Fervidor for the Heavenites, wasn’t on the Zuri calendar at all. The months at the ends of the wet and dry season had a few days each of untied time, days of cosmic unrest in indigenous eyes, time that didn’t buckle down to the routine cycles of the world written out by the universe. Fuzzy-time, border-time between.

Heaven’s calendar took no days off, butting the month of Meritoise right to the end of Fervidor without a second in between, even if the people who lived by that calendar really could use a break to slow down and figure some things out. This shifting gap was part of why the two calendars would be in eternal conflict.

Felix couldn’t remember exactly how many untied days there were before the Zuri reset their dates, and didn’t understand more than the broad strokes of Zuri culture and a few random bits of trivia. But he knew these unmonthed days were the reason for the increased foot traffic in and out of the bridge-gates, the strange rituals, the night-long parties echoing out of the Zuri Quarter. Adding to it all, this was one of the years the untied time period overlapped with the Festival of the Free, Heaven’s largest civic celebration of the year.

This was all of part of why Fervidor always and this year in particular felt like it was half over before it started. Every calendar box a packed rush, no chance to be missed or hour unfilled if you planned to make it to the end.

No, that wasn’t it, Felix thought. There was something else. Perhaps that it had felt like Fervidor for months, and the impending end of the rainy season was only that.

But none of this stuff about weather and calendars that Felix had learned before he dropped out was important right now. Nor was his indeterminate anxiety. It was all a cover, a distraction for himself because he didn’t want to understand what his roommate Vic was saying without saying right now, though he had been saying a lot for the past block. Now he had stopped talking, and the gap in sound meant Felix needed to give a response:

So you think we need someone else to come with us. A mercenary? he said, summarizing the last few sentence fragments he had heard.

Ya bruv, dey call emselves guides. But Im sayin, dis a good ting for us. Means were movin up in the world.

So how can we afford to hire a guide if we can’t even afford cigarettes?

Bruv, ye listenin? Dis is gonna double up, mebbe triple up wot we bring home! Afta dis, we can buy ye enuff cigs to last a lifetime, if ye juss forget it, juss dis once…

Felix didn’t buy it, but whatever. Vic had been steady wheedling him to quit— at least since they started pooling their paychecks. Neither roommate could afford their craphole Opportunity Housing apartment alone, and between the two’s incessant loaning and IOUing, splitting of the solar bill and groceries, reciprocal bar tab clearance and more, they had come treacherously close a few times to invoking their unit’s automatic Five-Day Notice for late payment. So for safety they began cashing all their stubs together and keeping the money under common management; Vic’s.

I’m just asking, Felix said. So what does a guide cost?

Dont. Ye ent good wiff the numbahs bruv, ye gonna throw my maffs off. S’all good, long as we make it til dis next month, den we can— oof. Head down, flya-lady up ahead. Dis one is Stormtouched for sure. Vic repositioned his parachute pack on his back and slumped his neck as they approached.

They were walking towards a wide-mouthed tent. Open space ringed a bedraggled woman at its flapping entrance. Her dress was well on its way to rags, smeared and ripped. A wooden sandwich board with an illegible manifesto scrawled in hundreds of tiny red letters dangled heavy on her neck. She canvassed back and forth, the sign’s weight making her movements clunky, beseeching the crowd with a haggard mass of handbills.

By unanimous decision, all passers-by were pretending the woman didn’t exist. Some put up a hand to blot her from their vision, but most walked straight by and let her cadenced freestyle raving bounce off their ears.

Keep movin bruv, dont stop.

Nope, wasn’t gonna. Felix said, swallowing, fighting back a sudden chill. The flyer-lady raise her head, and leveled her scratchy voice at the crowd.

"MERIT, LOGIC, FREEDOM, PEACE! When will all the troubles cease?

MERIT, LOGIC, FREEDOM, PEACE, when will all the troubles cease?

LISTEN ALL! Twelve score and four years, twelve score and four— this is how long it takes, FOR THE PRINCIPLES OF OUR FOUNDERS TO BE FORGOTTEN!

You there, all of you, I know you hear me but you would steal my voice if you could,

Steal it and eat it, steal it and pretend you can’t hear me as you WALK AWAY—

I’m here, I will remain, I am your shadow, I will NOT BE QUIETED!

You who crave answers! You who crave the solution!

Listen to me and I will tell, but you won’t hear! Heaven EATS IT CHILDREN!

SWALLOWING ITS YOUNG!

And what do you do? WALK ON BY, FANCY ONES. DEAD ONES.

I’m sick! You listen and don’t hear, I scream and scream and scream and nothing comes out!

The children too, do you hear them? No! You’re not listening! They scream! I scream!

I have seen the terror, what COMES AFTER THIS? Oh, what comes after THIS?

YOU’LL ALL KNOW SOON.

I have seen the end on high! I have seen the terror and it swallows us all!

You and you and YOU. High in the sky where you fly til you die, whether you listen to what

you can’t hear, the terror will find you too!

YOU, TRUST ME, YOU, AND YOU!

YOU DON’T EVEN SEE THE TRAP THAT’S SET,

Until you let me open the ears of your eyes. Oh yes.

Yes. Yes, there are answers! THEY know!

THEY know, you bet THEY do in their shiny towers, they know.

And I do too, from the end and beginning I have seen, from your blank faces!

And here I have written it, the answer, for all to read! Who knows more about the pain,

The terror of these years? You think you have answers? Speak to me! Come forth and argue!

But listen! No one will save you but if only, if only you would listen! YOU SIR.

Do you believe that the terror of change will come? Do you know it believes in you?

Do you hear me? Do you believe what the city is telling you?

MERIT, LOGIC, FREEDOM, PEACE—"

Her words became indiscernible as they got ten meters away.

Ha, haven’t heard the ‘eating the children’ one before, Felix wisecracked to Vic. That’s creative. He let his neck unclench as they passed her and into the big Zuri tent where Vic was leading them.

Bad way to go, gettin et. Vic said. Nuffin ever gits ye in one bite. Ye git chewed up first, a bit atta time. Nasty.

’Scuse me! Hey, wait, scuse me! a scratchy voice bounced off their backs, close.

Felix turned reflexively. The flyer woman was trailing them into the tent. He made eye contact with a pocked and wind-worn face, polished to a sunburnt shine. That wasn’t a Storm symptom, the crazed pupils were though. That was just what happened when you had no home, living under the constant elements of the city. Still she wasn’t old as she’d appeared at first. Under the grime and the piercing stare was a young-ish face. They could have been the same class in the Youth Spire.

She halted as Felix did, stabilizing her signboards.

Ayy, hold up, wha’g’wan!

Felix gave a wave and returned the greeting. He tried not to look at Vic or the crowd-eyes fixating on them.

Wha’g’wan. he said.

"Not much! Great day. Hey, yer a Wizard, right?

What makes you say that?

"Felix. Lets go bruv—"

The woman raised her eyebrows because it was obvious.

"Felix? As in, Felicitiares? Wizard for sure. Tought so. Your type dont come down here much, so. Me? Im really out here, born on the LC, Logic Causeway, yah mean? Yent from a Causeway with a name like Felicitiares. Sorta a College-boy-Wizard-type name, innit."

"I mean, yeah—but how did you know before he said my name?"

Oh, simp! Wizards look at the buildings like they sometin special and put they hands in they pockets, like there ent nuffin to worry bout out here.

This was ironic, considering the woman’s behavior, but apart from the unnerving look in her eye, she didn’t seem too Stormtouched when she wasn’t proselytizing.

She can turn it on and off. She must not have been struck directly, his head said.

He felt the crowd watch them talking. Vic was fidgeting next to him, deciding whether to give up and walk away.

Hey… Felix said to her, trying to affect kindness and not glance around— You should probably get going. Take a walk to a different neighborhood. Try to find somewhere to sleep or go inside for a while. You look like you need a break—

Nope, nope, nope, nope! She was weaving her head back and forth, talking over him. She spread her arms in a wide V, indicating the whole of existence. "Not tired. Can’t be. All this is ending soon if we don’t act. Lots of work.