November 3rd, 2397, Third Rise

It was a day like any other, really. Wake up late, get a shower, yawn and have breakfast while looking out and down through the floor at the crystalline ocean far below. Marcus enjoyed the view, all told, and it was one of the chief reasons he was here in the first place. The main one, of course, was that he had a.. 'knack' for finding and cleaning logjams in the dataflows. That knack had gotten him promoted to his current position aboard Zephyra. A position, some would say, that he was far too young and inexperienced for.

Typically, Central Control was manned by technicians in their sixth decade (at least!) and here he was barely into his second, and Zephyra was the newest of the Cities, too! She'd been active for some five decades now and if Marcus had to venture an opinion – which he would at the drop of a hat – he would conjecture that  the past two years have gone far smoother than the previous forty-eight combined. So, it was an honor and a source of no small amount of pride for the young man, who was-

*beep beep beep!*

Late, for one thing.

It was a day like any other, really. The late rising, the idle contemplation of the world far below, the frantic scrabbling into clothes, the mad dash for Central Control... Luckily, Marcus had it down to a science by now, and Zephyra was a smart girl, who learned her peoples' habits. Lift Tube 47 was two floors down and already wide open as the young man rounded the last corner. He slid the last few feet along a translucent floor like smokey quartz, neatly entering the shaft, where a miniature gale lifted him bodily and sped him upwards into the heart of the massive wing-shaped city.

"Thanks again, my lady," he said to the smooth walls of the tube he was speeding along.

Zephyra never spoke to anybody, but Marcus just knew (in that way that all young men "just know") that she held a special place for him in her heart. Literally, in a way, but also in the way that she anticipated his needs and desires. He liked to think it was because he spoke to her like a person and not a thing. It was not his City, She was.

The lift soon slowed, however, leaving him hovering effortlessly on a column of rising air until he stepped forward and into the metal-floored room. Machinery abounded and cables ran in all directions. The generators were just one floor below, but he couldn't even hear them – let alone feel them – here. Benny was just standing up and stretching back with a series of loud pops coming form his spine as Marcus strode over, waving a cheery, "Good Morning, Zephyra!" towards the cylinder in the center of the room. It shone with a brilliant light of shifting blues and purples that rippled along Central Control's pellucid walls.

"Late again, Marcus," Benny grumbled, but with a slight smile. He, at least, accepted Marcus' quirks, even if he didn't agree with them.

"Yeah, the tubes were slow," he joked, turning his back to the fierce glow and settling into the chair that Benny had vacated and letting it conform to his body as the older technician snorted disbelief at such a bald-faced lie.

"I think Lucy is due on in the mid-afternoon, but she said she might be running late with the problem in Hanger Fifteen. Can you cover if she can't show?"

"Yeah, sure, Zephyra and I will be just fine, won't we, my lady?"

Benny's indulgent smile was deemed to be tactful answer enough as the older man turned to head into the lift tube and, from there, to elsewhere in the City. Marcus watched him go before he bothered to pick up the special headset and slip it over his eyes, shaking his head in part bemusement, part frustration. "He'll never understand, my lady. So, how are you feeling today? Good, I trust? Well, let's just take a look and see, hmm? Sometimes hard to see your own elbow, you know." He chuckled at his own joke. He was always more socially at ease here than he was with any of his fellow technicians or any of the City's other inhabitants. He was a social recluse and always had been, but that was okay. Zephyra understood.

As the headset settled into place, arcs and whorls of light blossomed around him. Dendritic pathways and cricuitry running in three dimensions throughout the whole on Zephyra were laid bare before him. Crystalline courses branched and branched again, separating and coming back together like rivers in a delta: myriad channels, but all part of the same whole. Technical diagrams hung in the air, along with other labels that meant little to Marcus, but would be invaluable should any major overhauls need to be done to the system. The technician's gaze was already drifting back towards the center of the room, though.

Normally, the light coming from the cylinder was so bright as to conceal anything within and nobody could look directly at it without courting headaches and light spots – or worse – but the headset filtered out much of that, revealing the young woman floating effortlessly in the center of that cylinder, electrodes and cables and branches of light snaking in to attach to her body at a few key points, linking the technological and biological components of Zephyra in a harmonious dance.

Marcus stared at her for several minutes, as he always did, drinking in her sleek lines, the subtly fluttering tribal markings snaking along her bare arms and legs, her long auburn hair teased by the air currents, and the fuzziness around her edges, as her body blurred into the surrounding winds that were harnessed to give shape and form to the City itself. Her eyes were closed, her brow calm and composed, and she had never moved a muscle save once in Marcus' two years, three months, nineteen days, five hours, and fifty-four minutes. Even then, it was only to calm a hurricane out of existence at the behest of the nation they were passing over at the time.

His sigh was wistful as he shifted the headset on his head to drop his left eye back into the world of mortals. Just over one million of them, in fact, all bundled up inside of a City of pure power and selfless dedication. Cities could be anywhere, of any shape and size, but Marcus considered Zephyra to be the best of them, slowly cruising the upper troposphere and ne-

The slight shudder that rippled through Central Control was so soft as to be barely felt, but like the first crack in a concrete beam or the sudden silence of a canary, it boded ill. Marcus' trained eyes darted to the controls in front of him, where all looked to be in order, but tremors like that just didn't happen. They just didn't.

Zephyra had complete control over every breeze, gust, gale, and pressure change within her sphere of influence, and the entire City was built of solidified air. Not one molecule of the structure could so much as vibrate out of frequency without her express permission. Marcus' gaze jerked up towards the towering cylinder and even as the light dazed his left eye, his right focussed unerringly on the woman's, Zephyra's, face. It was twitching ever so softly, as if from a fitful dream and, as he watched, a single tear crept carefully out of her right eye and rolled down her cheek like a liquid diamond.

Then, her eyes flew open.

They were the most brilliant green that Marcus had ever seen in his life, but the shock of seeing those paled in comparison to the voice, ragged with terror and desperate madness, that echoed form the walls, the lift tubes, the very air itself, "THE MAW! THE GREAT MAW BECKONS!"

Everything stopped suddenly, like flies caught in amber, and the young man watched in horror as his only friend, his beautiful Zephyra twitched and the cables and tubes and more esoteric connections sloughed from her body like an old skin. His eyes widened as looked at him, directly at him, and whispered, "...I'm sorry."

Then there was nothing but open air all around him as the physical structure of Zephyra, City of Winds popped out of existence like a soap bubble and the woman who held some one million fifty three souls in her hands, responsible for their very health and safety, simply... Let Go.