Welcome to Fractured Harmony, by Soaria and Ashlyn Nafina. Soaria is the music/media project of author Ashlyn Nafina.

You can contact/follow Soaria/Ashlyn on the Fediverse (aka Mastodon): @avynaria@mk.aetheri.ca

Also, a slower pace, longer form Soaria blog.

This is a book containing many pieces of media, both visual and audible. Think of it like a self-guided tour at a museum: you may feel free to look or listen to anything you like as you read the story, in whatever order you like. They've been placed somewhere that we think is aesthetically appropriate, but it's your reading experience. You can even skip them if you like; it won't detract from the overall story.

If you'd like a single page, to make into a PDF or to read with an audiobook reader, there is a single page version of the story with less decoration and scripting. (Warning: It's big.)

All of the audio is available separately as an album to which you can listen separate from the reader.

Most of the art was created in tandem with Midjourney. Probably nothing that can be said here will please the die-hard AI art critics, but for anyone else who is curious...:

Most of the images started with an idea based on the story. A great deal of prompt searching finds a good base image, and then some amount of back-and-forth happens with in-painting and re-painting. After an upscale, the image is downloaded and gets anywhere from five minutes to hours of Pixelmator Pro manual labour. Sometimes intermediate images are combined and then sent back through Midjourney as prompt inputs, and the process begins again. Interestingly, sometimes the surprising output of the images also inspired story changes. It's a collaborative process.

The writing is purely hand-crafted, outside of the normal Scrivener tools and such.

The music doesn't use any generative AI, either. Music production today involves a fair amount of AI by default (for things like solo mastering), but no prompt-to-audio stuff. You can find more notes with each track on SoundCloud.

And with that, let's all gather 'round: it's time for us to venture to a very different kind of Earth...

There's just something about the graveyard of a civilization, Miron thought grimly as his boots crunched across the desolate soil. Especially when it's the ancestor of one's own.

Miron's career had pulled him in circles, reeling him in faster and faster, ultimately to land on this place where nothing circled, and nothing reeled. He'd imagined great festivals with noisy crowds and laughing children; towering technology taking care of every need; galleries full of the greatest works of art. And a fascinated scientific community ready to greet his crew and learn how his branch of humanity had fared amongst the stars for the last few thousand years.

But none of these things were to be found on Old Earth. Just dusty hints of memories without even cobwebs.

"Is that it?" Miron had asked. "Surely not. I was hoping my research would land us somewhere in the vicinity of Old Earth."

He sighed.

Miron's long research project on finding Old Earth had seemed to have borne fruit, finally. The stellar system was there in front of him. And now, he and the crew of the Morning Dew had found a dead ball of rock instead of a living, breathing planet.

"Your paper posited a G-class yellow star with around nine planets, correct?" Nell asked from the helm.

"Yes..." Miron answered slowly, not liking where this was going, and yet already knowing exactly where it was going.

The holographic display shifted around the bridge until the yellow star was clearly visible in the centre. Several planets circled around it, with ghostly rings showing their orbits, zooming around the display in a mimicry of their normal motion, until they slowed to a stop at the present time.

Miron started counting the orbits, but he already knew what he would find.

The colourful gas giants and frozen worlds with rings of their own. The asteroid belt. And the giant moon orbiting the dead rock they were situated near.

"No..."

"Sadly, yes," Nell responded. "Basically no atmosphere to speak of, and no life signs. I'm sorry. I would've liked to have seen it, too."

"It was once said," Miron responded sombrely, "that viewing Earth from space, one was struck with an almost unbearable sense of beauty and protectiveness, thinking about how all of humanity, all known life, everything one knows, was down there under the thinnest atmospheric shell, so fragile. That was a long time ago, now."

"On the plus side," Alin chipped in, "if you can call it that, there are ruins. Do you want to go down and take a look?"

The Morning Dew seemed to move away from them as the shuttle sped down toward the surface. The humans who had lived on Earth in its heyday would hardly have recognized the Dew as a ship; it looked more like a collection of crystalline geometric shapes held together by an inexplicable force.

The shuttle itself wasn't much different, really. A small sphere apparently made of chrome, with comfortable couches inside. At the bottom of their descent, it would hover above the ground, abstract and impenetrable. A droplet falling from its aptly named mothership.

The birthplace of humanity, Miron brooded to himself. What could have brought it so low, so thoroughly?

Nell brought the landing craft in low, the dark ground flashing past smoothly through the transparent walls all around them, homing in on one of the ruins that Alin had found. A seemingly infinite number of tall buildings stretched off into the distance. Some looked to have been quite beautiful in their heyday; many were clearly designed to be covered in glass, though not much of it remained undamaged. Years with no atmosphere, no protection against asteroids and other invaders, had been unkind to the surface.

"How about right there?" Miron asked, pointing at a clearing. "Was that some kind of park, you think?"

"Very little remains of our records of this place," Alin said, shaking his head. "Your guess is as good as mine. But if I might make an anthropological analysis..."

"We're Contact, after all," Nell said, sounding slightly downcast.

"Yes," Alin replied somberly. "Quite."

He flicked a finger and a translucent display popped up in the air between them.

"Well," he continued, "there is this large, open area that looks like it might have once held plants. Some small pieces of wood remain lodged in the ground. At one end of it, you can see a structure that might be some sort of palace or government building. We're likely to find something interesting there."

"Deena?" Miron asked the brown-haired, golden-eyed Reman.

She cast her senses outward, holding a crystal in one hand as a focus.

"There's no life here," she said, shaking her head. "But... I don't know. Something weird."

Nell halted their descent. "Weird?"

"Not phantoms," Deena put in quickly. "We know what those were, and there doesn't seem to be any Tear Stone on this world. But... I don't know. It's almost like a flip-side cousin of phantoms. I can't put a finger on it."

"I can't say I like the sound of that," Miron said ominously.

"On the other hand," Alin replied, "this may be one of the few chances anyone gets to see the surface of Old Earth. Just a quick jaunt down and back up?"

It took a moment for everyone to nod reluctantly, but eventually they did.

Rough soil crunched and shifted under their shoes, little more than dust and gravel without the atmosphere. Gravity held it down jealously with no air giving it wings to swirl upwards.

Motive shields, the same technology holding together the independent pieces of the Morning Dew, wrapped around each of them, obviating the need for bulky space suits.

"These ramparts would imply a sort of fortification, but the stonework is quite primitive," Alin commented. "Additionally, the deep pit here with a bridge implies this was probably filled with water at one time. The signs of erosion on the rocks, too, there and there. Perhaps this is a museum of an old castle?"

"In the middle of a vast metropolis?" Miron asked him. "Perhaps it's a recreation? Or maybe they built the city around it. I wish we could read these pictographs; I assume that they're writing, anyhow. They look like old Carash."

"This is exceptionally eerie," Nell commented quietly. "It's not just random, alien ruins we find out in space. These were our ancestors. Or perhaps distant cousins, more like."

The group started down the stone path that led from the bridge and continued their way toward the castle.

"I feel like we're being watched," Deena said. "Nothing could be living here, and yet... it's unsettling."

Miron held up a hand, and the group stopped walking.

"That's it," he said. "I want to see what's around the corner as much as the next person, but I trust Deena's senses too much to ignore them. We're heading back. Quietly. Quickly."

All of them were explorers, and disappointed at having a treat taken away from them. But more than a few of them sighed in relief to be heading back. Something was wrong. The sharp eyes of a silent predator seemed to hide just out of reach, fascinated and following. Hungry.

The automated probes could do a thorough survey later.

Perhaps 500 metres away from their shuttle, whatever had been stalking them sensed its prey getting away.

"Movement at 8 o'clock," Nell said urgently.

The group turned their heads to look, and flickers of shadows were visible where nothing should be, where nothing could be alive.

"Fly," Miron said, and the whole group's motive shields lifted them from the ground.

At that point, the shadows stopped hiding. They slithered out from cracks and crannies, swimming like squid, nightmare's own jellyfish, made from dark smoke.

"Dear gods," Alin breathed. "That can't be the Fenritha?"

"Fly now, analyze later!" Miron shouted.

They were closing, closing...

The whole group slammed through the suddenly open door of the shuttle, piling into the back wall as the door closed again, the shuttle launching into space like a shining cannonball.

The black smoke creatures seemed to lose interest in them as they ascended into space.

"Phew," Alin sighed.

"Too early to relax," Nell said, concerned. "Incoming ships at fifteen, two-hundred, thirty-six, on an intercept course."

"Type?" Miron asked curtly.

"Nothing I've ever seen," Nell said, shaking her head.

One of the ships was showing on the holographic display in the shuttle.

"Take a Fenritha and put it into a space tank," Miron said through gritted teeth. "It'd look about like that."

Not just a squid or a jellyfish, but a squid covered in black, metallic, armoured plating, undulating impossibly smoothly.

The shuttle rejoined the Morning Dew. But the menacing, black ships still floated out there, waiting, and before long, more of them wavered into space around the Dew.

"All options on the table," Miron said when they'd returned to the conference room on the Dew.

"We could try a jump to inverspace," Nell said.

"They might just follow us," Alin replied. "Or even break our jump. What's that weird wavering they do, anyway?"

Deena held up a hand and a little flame hovered over it. "Kaboom?"

Miron shook his head. "There might not be any air in those ships to detonate. I'm guessing Met's ice won't do much better."

"Too bad we don't have my buddy in Balance here," she muttered.

"Let's claw the shit out of 'em," Mi'anta, the man with cat ears, said, those ears pulled back nearly flat. "Fight, fight!"

But the choice was taken out of their hands; in spite of its inertial dampeners, the floor of the Dew took its leave of the crew; they were rocked suddenly side to side, nearly throwing everyone off balance. Pens and papers were strewn about the conference room as if a small hurricane had passed through.

Shoes pounded on the floor as they ran for the bridge.

"Unknown ships have attached to our hull," Nell said shakily. "Our sensors didn't even see them move... bloody hell."

The crew seemed to be holding their collective breath, looking around uneasily, as an eerie banging sound crept into their ears. The ships outside seemed to be clamping around the Morning Dew, intending who knew what.

Suddenly, the banging ceased. All was silent, and nothing seemed to move outside. Fear hung in the room palpably.

And just like that, the black ships disengaged, seeming to waver into nothingness.

Once again, the ship shook uncontrollably.

"We're trapped in the wake of their... whatever they did!" Nell yelled over the din. "We're being sucked in after them!"

Musing in an infinitely long moment, Miron was reminded viscerally of a memory that had come back to him after years and years. He'd been at a water park, pulled up to the top of a hill, and then paused. Nothing had moved, but he understood the inevitability, staring down at the bottom of the slide, impossibly far away. And for the first time in his life, he'd known the meaning of being completely out of control.

Miron grabbed the railing for dear life, much as he had back then. He felt consciousness slipping down the dark hill of unknown technology beyond even their own, as the ship was thrown thousands of light years away.