About the Author: I’m Billie. I’m a gamer, a feminist, an educator, a nerd, and a lover of stories. I’m always trying to figure out "what happens?" This story was inspired by the industrial revolution, Maslow’s hierarchy, melting ice caps, and floral wallpaper. I always appreciate thoughts and advice on plot, pacing, and progression. The lore for Aegis is still very much in development (as in "I’m making it up as I write") so please point out any contradictions.

Writers who have inspired this work and influence my writing are Ursula K. Leguin, Tamora Pierce, and William Morris.

Aegis to Nowhere Summary: Aegis 7 is the last of seven stratacities, semi-sentient structures that fly above the Nowhere, ripping ancient magic from the earth to fuel flight and support life. The stratacities pass over the Nowhere in slow trajectories, leaving blight in their wake-- but the Blight is an easy price to pay, because no one lives in the Nowhere.

Each stratacitie is home to millions. Aegis 7 is the religious center, fat with power and ripe with intrigue, and yet it provides for all of those who can connect to the Aegis-- the force that keeps people alive so close to the heavens, and connects all people in consensus. No one who can connect to the Aegis wants for shelter, for food, for love. No one who can connect to the Aegis is alone, and nothing is secret from the Aegis, at least not for long.

But there are those few, like Geist, who can’t connect fully-- the Aegiless. Geist can’t share thoughts or enter consensus, which makes her an excellent courier of secrets. Disconnected from a force that provides people with everything they need, she survives by delivering messages hidden from the Aegis for whoever pays her in gifts of food, clothing, and shelter-- from major politicians with dirty secrets, to radical suffragists who want to extend citizenship to the Aegiless and grant them consensus through an interpreter.

Life for Aegiless like Geist is a string of survival mechanisms and quick wits, but when the suicide of of a beloved consensus reformer raise tensions between conservatives and radicals, Geist must chose. Keep her head down like always, or stand along with the Aegiless and the suffragists? But before she can follow through, Geist falls victim to something unthinkable. She falls from Aegis 7 and into the Nowhere.

What she finds in the Nowhere changes things... forever.