Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2026
“Precipice Sun” is an epistolary science-fantasy novelette told entirely through a series of journal entries addressed to an absent, unnamed recipient named Aohane. The narrator — a sharp-tongued, wingless thief and self-described survivor — has arrived on Vaihuei-Sing, a ruined colony star of scorched-purple skies, as a jack-of-all-trades embedded with a small archaeological dig team.
The story unfolds in layers. On the surface, the narrator chronicles her time on Vaihuei-Sing: exploring the city, being cheated in the markets (purchasing a counterfeit feather-cape she’d intended as a gift for Aohane), crossing the fractured dome-line into the forbidden ruinlands, and climbing perilous cliffs toward an ancient temple dedicated to the Celestial Empress — a child-goddess who, in local legend, rescued starships in her sleep and whose wings were subsequently burned by her devoted followers.
Woven through these accounts is a portrait of a morally complex woman reckoning with her past. We learn she grew up a feral street urchin on Kwai-Sing, had her wings amputated, and committed her first killing at thirteen to prevent a temple missionary from separating her from her younger brother Fai. She carries the names of everyone she’s ever killed and insists, repeatedly, that she does not regret what survival demanded of her.
The relationship with Aohane gradually comes into focus through reminiscence. The two met aboard a Governor’s starship — the narrator a wingless stowaway mid-theft, Aohane a Vaihueian guard who chose not to report her. Their brief, charged alliance led to a night together and a plan to escape the colonial system. The plan failed; the narrator was captured. Aohane eventually escaped alone, and the narrator later pieced together that Aohane had killed the corrupt Governor — found strangled with his mouth stuffed with feathers — before fleeing the Sing system entirely.
The story’s moral and emotional crisis arrives at the temple. Once the team uncovers the ruins and hears the full history of the Celestial Empress — a child exploited, massacred for, and ultimately enslaved by the Imperess — the narrator drugs her crewmates’ wine and steals their findings for herself, justifying the betrayal as necessity. She had promised Aohane she would never kill again. But their young guide, having followed the team up the cliff in secret, witnesses everything. Panicking, the narrator kills him in a frantic struggle, then hides his body in the rocks.
The story closes with the narrator fleeing Vaihuei-Sing aboard a dark cargo vessel, carrying a few stolen relics and feathers plucked from the dead boy’s wings as a “memento.” She meditates on guilt, freedom, and the cyclical nature of survival-driven violence — wondering whether she and Aohane were always destined to orbit each other without ever truly merging. The final toast, raised to both their freedoms, is achingly ambivalent: liberation and culpability, as always in her life, arriving inseparable.
Ewen Ma’s work can be found in venues such as Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Deadlands, Fusion Fragment, Kaleidotrope, Haven Spec, Anathema, and the anthology Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, among others. Ewen is a graduate of Clarion West and Tin House and was shortlisted for the Future Worlds Prize in 2020. They are a Hong Konger currently based in the UK. Catch Ewen on Bluesky @ewenmaer.bsky.social or their website ewenma.com.