Clarkesworld, March 2026
On the storm-wracked moon of Rai, an unnamed young lord navigates a vast, labyrinthine manor whose shifting concentric rooms reflect the deteriorating mind of the Levinlord — his dying father. Aided by an AI presence called IZA, whose voice was programmed long ago by a mysterious su-woman named Izanami, the young lord sets out through the reconfiguring manse to reach his father’s stigma solar at the house’s heart. Almost immediately, he encounters a small, fast-moving creature of unknown origin before escaping into hidden ventilation shafts, guided by a claret-robed su-woman retainer named Ni.
The su-folk — the aqueous, finned people who labor and live on Rai — have taken refuge from the storm in the manor’s vast library, where the young lord observes both the depth of their devotion to his father’s storms and the undercurrents of revolution among them. A group led by a saltworker named Trun, equipped with ghost-resistant gear and stolen duplicator technology, ambushes the young lord in an upstairs reading room, intending to harvest his Levinite organs. He escapes by invoking IZA, electrocuting one of his captors, and fleeing into the chaos below, where the creature from the alcove — now grotesquely enlarged — is feeding on the dead.
In the gilded compartment of his demi-cousin Dian, the young lord learns his father has long since stopped taking the saline decoctions meant to slow his neurological decline. Dian, speaking through a constructed proxy body, urges him to consider hastening his father’s death — a suggestion the young lord refuses, recognizing her manipulation and purging a toxin she’d slipped into his food using his bioelectric ghost. He departs with Ni, who confesses her quiet complicity with the revolutionaries, explaining she helped them out of a longing for something more than their circumscribed existence. Her honesty moves him, though he cannot fully admit his own culpability in her endangerment.
Traversing the horror of his uncle Biku’s inner domain — where the monstrous, enlarged Levinite conducts grotesque experiments on su captives — the young lord and Ni are caught in the collision of Trun’s armed revolt and Biku’s brutal retaliation. When a metal stack crushes Ni, her hand slips from his. In the underground pipe network, the abdicator Yom — transformed by years of chemosynthetic isolation — reveals that the creature, the Stochast, is a hybrid organism grown from Levinite, su, and bacterial genetics, now loose in the house. He arms the young lord with heavener plate armor and directions to the glass-scape canopy above.
On the storm-lashed rooftop, the young lord lures the Stochast onto a grounding spire and calls down a rare lazulite lightning strike, destroying them both — though he survives, barely, through the armor and his Levinite physiology. He reaches the solar to find his father small, burned, and nearly gone. Their reunion is spare and unresolved; the young lord offers no promises about upholding tradition, only that he will do his best. After his father dies, he carries Ni’s remains to the shore alongside his father’s ashes, performing funerary rites before the watching su, including Trun. Standing at the water’s edge, he resolves not to close doors the way his father did — to open the house, and perhaps more, to something new.
Thomas Ha is a Nebula, Ignyte, Hugo, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Award-nom-inated writer of speculative short fiction. You can find his work in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Weird Horror Magazine, among other publications. His work has also appeared in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. His debut short story collection, Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, is available at Undertow Publications and wherever books are sold. Thomas grew up in Honolulu and, after a decade plus of living in the northeast, now resides in Los Angeles with his family.