Yellow Jacket

Overview

It drifts above Hemera like a stolen continent, larger than cities, older than memory, carried on a foundation of floating stone threaded with roots and machines. Its canopy glitters like fractured glass in the sun, scattering rainbows through the clouds below. From its edges, waterfalls plunge in endless silver veils, breaking into mist before they ever touch the ground. Beneath its belly, colossal roots dangle like chandeliers, studded with glowing flowers that sway in the wind.

From the ground, the Sky Garden looks like paradise untethered, but it is no paradise. It is a single vast theft, a collage of ecosystems torn from every corner of Hemera, fused together through violence, graft, and gene-manipulation until they appear whole. It is the Neuman's masterpiece, a floating empire of stolen life.

The Flora

None of the plants in the Sky Garden are natural in their place. Every one was taken and then remade.

Prism Trees – Mangroves gutted from coasts and rewritten until their trunks grew clear, their fronds refracting sunlight into shifting kaleidoscopes. They stand in regimented groves, forming cathedral-like halls of light.

Spiral Blooms – Flowers swollen to monstrous size, their petals metallic and coiled. Entire fields of them open and close in slow, synchronized rhythms, making the ground itself breathe.

Driftpetals – Modified prairie flora that shed glowing petals endlessly. They hover in the air like lanterns before dissolving, leaving glowing motes in trails.

Rainveil Moss – Torn from mountain ridges, engineered to exude a perpetual mist. Veils of rainbow-colored spray drift between trunks, so dense that some groves are almost impossible to see through.

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Starbloom Lilies – Lakes within the Garden shimmer with lilies that pulse with light like constellations. At night, their reflections make it seem as though the waters hold a second sky.

The illusion is of a thriving wilderness, but beneath the soil, pumps and tubing keep it alive, while drones disguised as insects prune errors before they spread.

The Fauna

The Sky Garden's animals are as stolen as its plants, reshaped until they no longer resemble their origins.

Crystal Serpents – Snakes calcified into translucent forms. They coil among Prism Trees like glass threads, gleaming with inner light.

Velum Beasts – Rays pulled from oceans, rewritten until they drift in air instead of water. They move among the canopies like pale leviathans, their fins trailing ribbons of luminescence.

Chorus Moths – Vast moths with stained-glass wings that vibrate into deep organ-like tones when startled, filling the Garden with haunting chords.

Every one of these creatures exists only because the Neuman forced them to. Their instincts are edited, their biology corrected, their roles maintained by constant manipulation.

The Edges

The edges of the Sky Garden are the most surreal:

Waterfall Veils: Dozens of rivers cascade off the sides, their mist painting permanent rainbows in the skies.

Hanging Roots: Roots dangle for hundreds of meters, glowing flowers blossoming along their length, swaying like lantern chains.

Cages in Bloom: Tangled growths of branch and vine hang from the underside, some empty, some not. To those below, they look like fruits of wood and bone, swaying with the wind.

Atmosphere

To walk in the Sky Garden is to step into a dream too vivid to be real. Light refracts in endless prisms. Petals drift like snow. Rivers sparkle with mollusks that gleam like gemstones. Wolves with mirrored spines pace silently at your side, unthreatening, eyes shining with stolen light. Above, massive rays drift through the canopy, their fins shedding color in trails. At night, the lakes pulse with star-flowers, reflecting a second, brighter sky.

It is beautiful. Breathtaking. Overwhelming.

And yet beneath every wonder is the knowledge that none of it belongs here. It is not a paradise, it is a prison of ecosystems, forced together and chained in balance by machines that never stop humming.