Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2026
The story concludes the two-part novella following Lande, a young mountain-touched mechanic working at an Outranger-controlled dreamstone mine deep in the veil — a liminal region where the valley’s dreams become physical reality. Carrying a hidden folk otter mask to work, Lande is arrested by a soldier who discovers it, only to be dramatically rescued by Boss Steiger, the mine’s feared foreman, who shoots the soldier dead and returns her mask. Steiger’s behavior is puzzling until Lande pieces together the truth she blurts aloud: the Outrangers have been imprisoning mountain-touched people deeper in the veil to harvest dreamstones from regions too dream-saturated for Outranger minds to withstand, and Elder Moench, the hidden folk leader, has been complicit in exchange for weapons.
Before Steiger can act on what Lande knows, Master Dodds — Lande’s engineering mentor — intervenes with terrifying, inhuman force. By reciting ever-escalating boiler pressure values with Lande, compelling her otter mask to amplify their words into reality, Dodds detonates the incoming dream train in a catastrophic explosion. The blast physically levels much of the mine and releases a flood of shattered dreamstones whose dreams overwhelm the Outrangers with unescapable nightmares while leaving valley folk largely unaffected. In the aftermath Dodds kills Steiger, takes command of the mine’s recovery, and burns the office records. When he explains himself to Lande in private, the full scope of what he is emerges: a being created from centuries of valley folk nightmares about landslides and mountains, shaped and reshaped against his will by the dreams of others. He has been working with the Outrangers across three hundred years, systematically destroying sections of the veil to push mining operations deeper, seeking the freedom of a fixed, rational identity.
Dodds needs Lande — a mountain-touched person who also understands Outranger science — to help him destroy another two leagues of veil. He offers to free her imprisoned friend Avy and the other hidden folk as part of their deal, and Lande agrees while privately planning resistance. They travel deep into the veil by armored locomotive and Lande finds Avy and thirty-two other survivors in a desolate encampment behind a supernatural reverse landslide, the people hollowed and traumatized. Lande persuades them to flee through a tunnel Dodds opens, and once the hidden folk are loaded onto the passenger car, she makes her move: she blinds Dodds with coal dust, tears off her otter mask, and, eyes open to the veil’s searing light, speaks aloud her love of the valley — family, friends, landscape, even its difficult people — joined by Avy and all the hidden folk through their masks. Their shared dreaming transforms the locomotive into a creature of the valley itself and banishes Dodds back into the landslide he embodies.
Lande collapses and wakes as the runaway train hurtles toward the valley’s exit. At the Outranger loading facility, she and Avy are taken prisoner by a new commander, but Lande discovers that the veil’s light has permanently altered her sight: she can now perceive and manipulate dreamstones at a distance. She overwhelms the soldiers with the stolen dreams they wear, scattering them, and Avy rallies the hidden folk to seize weapons, supplies, and an extra train. Lande takes the journal exposing Elder Moench’s betrayal and recovers looted ancestral dreamstones to return to the mountains. The transformed locomotive pulls them back toward home, and the story ends with Lande and Avy embracing as the train races through the valley.
Jason Sanford is an award-winning author and an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Born and raised in the American South, he currently lives in the Midwestern U.S. with his wife and sons. His life’s adventures include work as an archaeologist and as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
Jason has published more than a dozen of his short stories in the British SF magazine Interzone, which once devoted a special issue to his fiction. His fiction has also been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Tales of the Unanticipated, The Mississippi Review Online, Diagram, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Pindeldyboz, and other places. Books containing his stories include multiple “year’s best” story collections along with original anthologies such as Bless Your Mechanical Heart.