Harlan Cobe 

Fleeing Orithya 

Translated by Valentina Pace

Copyright © 2026 – Harlan Cobe

Copyright © 2026 – Harlan Cobe

All rights reserved.

No part of this book can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written consent of the author/publisher, except for reproduction for personal and private use only, within the limits permitted by law.

The characters, places, and events described in this work are fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

Prologue

When the sky learned to lie

There are worlds that die slowly, with the discretion of things so vast that they cannot collapse all at once.

They don’t break in a single day. They do not explode under a single terminal light. Instead, they begin to fail in habits, in vocabularies, in the tone of official voices, in the collective patience in which their population decides to call "transitory" what is already irreparable.

Orithya died this way for a long time, without quite deciding its final fate.

    First, the seasons broke down.

Winters, once crisp and silent, became irregular, plagued by warm rains and electrostatic storms that uprooted crops. Internal seas started to transform their composition: algae turned toxic, coasts receded, entire port cities were forced to raise dams, then barriers, then walls. Northern glass forests started to lose their transparency; trees absorbed metals from the rains and grew fruits that were opaque, beautiful, and useless.

Then the borders broke down.

The ancient nations, which for centuries had tolerated each other with rivalry and suspicion, began to keep an eye on one another with the greed of those who know resources are running out, and that hunger will require political reasons to be justified, sooner or later. Disputes over deep water, isotopic deposits, atmospheric transport corridors, and access to computing networks and orbital routes were first described as strategic misalignments, then as emergencies, and finally as historical inevitabilities.

In the end, words themselves broke down.

It was the most alarming symptom, and almost nobody realized it in time.

Wars were no longer called wars, but “operations of stabilization,” hunger became "distributive tension,” and the displaced were defined as “excess mobility.” Censorship took the name of “informational hygiene.” Lies stopped being denials of truth and became, more elegantly, alternative and compatible versions of it.

The populations of Orithya adapted to this corrupted language in the same way one would adapt to a sickly light in a room. Initially, it’s visible. Then it's tolerable. In the end, one forgets that another way of seeing things exists.

The capitals continued to shine.

Government buildings reflected the sun with perfect facades. The news spoke with a steadfast tone. Analysts drew reassuring curves over the glowing screens. The arms markets expanded. Surveillance networks became thinner, more widespread, more intimate. Every crisis was an opportunity to demand new renunciations in the name of security; every renunciation prepared the next; each next one seemed, compared to the previous, only a small reasonable sacrifice.

Thus, citizens learned to live within the narrowing.

Protein bread lines in the eastern districts. Controlled blackouts in working class neighborhoods. Schools turned into logistic hubs. Doctors were "temporarily" relocated and never returned. Recruitment lists kept getting younger. Journalists disappeared from programs without explanation. Maps were constantly updated, as if repainting the territories could prevent blood from doing its work.

All of this happened under a sky that was still beautiful.

Perhaps this was the cruelest aspect of Orithya: its stubborn magnificence. The sunsets still ignited the salt plains. The two moons continued to rise above the oceans with indifferent grace. The red deserts sang to the wind. From above, the cities looked like ordered constellations. Even military satellites, on clear nights, traced orbits so precise as to create for a moment the illusion of order.

But order was no longer a promise. It became the name by which the powerful administered fear.

In homes, people spoke softly. In ministries, people spoke clearly. On the networks, people shouted.

Each nation had its own tale of the enemy. In the West, it was said that Velarys, the Eastern Confederation, was ready to invade the world in the name of purity and control. In the East, they swore that Cerynth and its allies had turned freedom into a mask for economic and cultural domination. In between, the neutral regions sold mediations, fuel, weapons systems and balanced indignation.

Meanwhile, the truth withered into incompatible fragments.

Each family kept its own. Each government fabricated its own. Each survivor learned to remain silent, until the silence became a second nervous system.

And yet, beneath this immense architecture of fear, something remained that strategic models could not fully measure.

The smallest gestures remained.

A woman sharing water with a stranger at a checkpoint. A teacher explaining the names of constellations to children, even though no one looked up at the sky without fear anymore. A doctor falsifying records for the expendable. A technician slowing a surveillance network just enough to allow a family to walk by. An archivist copying forbidden data on storage devices, as if the truth were a seed to protect from fire.

The story of Orithya did not begin with the governors.

It did not begin in sealed parliaments, in command centers, or in rooms where strategists decided how many lives a system could afford to lose without changing the tone of press conferences.

It began elsewhere.

It began at the exact point where two creatures trained to distrust each other found themselves, recognizing one another, defying every grammar of their time.

One came from the vertical West of towers and energy corridors. The other came from the shining East of archives and secret codes. Both had been born into already armed maps. Both had learned very early that power prefers fearful citizens to lucid ones. Both, unaware, were walking towards the point where their private destinies would meet a faltering world.

Before them, there had been noise.

The noise of news, of sirens, of promises, of orbital engines, of suppressed protests, of tense cities, of deserts crossed by convoys, of drones above roofs, of families who could no longer sleep without a ready bag by the door.

After them, the choice would come.

But at the beginning, as in all stories that truly matter, there was only a crack.

A crack in the obedience. A crack in the official language. A crack in the orderly way the world demanded to be told.

Through that crack came doubt, then pity, then love.

And love, on planets about to be lost, never arrives as a decoration. It arrives as a scandalous force. As a desertion. As the last form of clarity left to the living.

Many years later, when other skies would welcome other names and a new sun would learn to rise over a land not yet corrupted by the memory of war, someone might have told this story in a simple way, almost as a legend: two lovers fled from a world on the verge of dying and found another to inhabit.

But that is not how it happened.

No world is left behind without dragging its ash along. No love born in collapse remains pure enough to ignore mourning. No salvation is innocent, if  snatched from a time when others are left behind.

And yet, there are moments when even a civilization on the verge of collapse produces, in its dark core, something irreducible to its calculations.

A gentle choice. An unexpected loyalty. Two hands seeking each other while everything urged them to take up arms.

This is the story of those hands.

Of how they found each other. Of what they were forced to lose. Of what they dared to save.

And of a sky that, after lying for so long, saw two figures cross it. Not to conquer it, but to deserve a dawn.

Chapter I

The sky under siege

On Orithya, the sky had long ceased to belong to the stars.

Once, the elders said, nights had the texture of velvet and the silence was so pure that one could distinguish the breath of the sea from the slow movements of the quartz forests. Yet for many seasons, the firmament had become an occupied surface: military routes, surveillance drones, armored satellites, armed stations orbiting like patient predators over the planet's skin. The stars were still there, but they only appeared in the gaps, like truths granted by mistake.

Elian Varek worked in the energy grid of the western capital, Cerynth, a city of pale spires and suspended bridges, so vertical it seemed built not for its inhabitants, but for the gaze of power. Each morning he passed through the biometric gates of Sector Nine alongside hundreds of silent technicians, men and women repairing the veins of a world while its rulers continued to promise salvation, and at the same moment, negotiate its ruin.

He was not a rebel. Not yet. He had learned, like everyone else, to recognize lies without naming them. There were words that infested every screen: security, necessity, containment, sovereignty. There were images repeated until they became hypnotic: the enemy beyond the border, the purity of one’s nation, peace as a future reward for an increasing present violence. And there were the small signs no propaganda could erase: empty warehouses in poor districts, soldiers too young at checkpoints, schools turned into logistics hubs, families "temporarily" relocated and never seen again.

The night everything changed, Elian was repairing an atmospheric stabilization node on the edges of the eastern district. The wind smelled of copper and electric rain. Above, defense fighters cut through the clouds with regular trajectories, too orderly to be random and too frequent to reassure.

It was then he saw the capsule.

It descended from the sky with an irregular oscillation, like a heart that had lost its rhythm. It did not explode. It was not intercepted. It crashed beyond the containment zone, on a field of metallic salt, raising a white cloud that hung for a few seconds in the violet sunset air.

Elian should have alerted command. Instead, he shut off the service channel, climbed into his technical vehicle, and drove toward the impact point.

The capsule held the seal of Velarys, the Eastern Confederation, described in Cerynth as cruel, fanatical, even incapable of conceiving civilization. For years he had been taught that nothing from there could come without carrying a threat.

He forced open the hatch with an impulse tool.

Inside there was a woman.

She was curled against the containment seat, one hand clutching a now drained emitter. Her face, fine and severe, was lined with thin traces of pearlescent light running from her cheekbones to her temples, a distinctive feature of the people of Velarys. Her hair, as pale as ash under the moon, was soaked with dark blood at her shoulder. Her eyes were half open, but in that wounded gaze still burned an almost ferocious pride.

“You’re late,” she murmured in a broken voice. “If you wanted to catch me alive, you should have hurried.”

Elian looked at her for a moment longer than necessary. She was the enemy, he should have thought. Concrete proof of what the news called hostile infiltration.

Yet the first thought that came was another: she's trembling.

“I'm not here to turn you in,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes. “Then you're either naive or mad.”

“Perhaps both.”

The woman tried to move, but pain took her breath away. Elian extended a hand slowly, to not frighten her. She stared at it as one stares at an impossible gesture.

“What's your name?” he asked.

She hesitated. In times of war, a name is the first frontier.

“Lyris.”

Elian nodded. “I am Elian.”

He carefully lifted her out of the capsule. She was lighter than her pride would have led one to imagine. He carried her into an old abandoned maintenance module, nestled under an industrial water collection platform, a refuge he used during network outages. There, he closed her wound with coagulating foam, gave her purified water, and gave her time to realize she was not trapped.

Outside, the sky continued to tremble.

After a few minutes, Lyris spoke without looking at him.

“They will bomb Saern Bay tonight.”

Elian stiffened. “How do you know?”

She let out a faint laugh, tired, almost pained. “Because those in Cerynth will say it's our military depot. And those in Velarys will respond that it's your crime against unarmed civilians. Perhaps both will be true. Perhaps none. It will depend on who edits the footage.”

Elian didn't reply. On the way to the module, public screens had already begun broadcasting warnings of a “preventive defensive operation.”

They remained silent for a while, listening to the distant hum of turbines and each other’s breathing, so foreign yet already less hostile.

“Why did you help me?” Lyris finally asked.

Elian lowered his eyes to the bloodied gauze he had just thrown into a sterile container.

“Because they taught me to call you a monster,” he said softly. “But you're suffering like anyone would.”

Lyris stared at him for a long moment. There was something terrible in that sentence. Not pity, but recognition. The simple admission that beyond the border there was not an idea, but a person.

That night, Elian did not return home.

He sat on the metallic floor of the shelter, his back against the wall and his head tilted, while the stranger from Velarys slept a few feet away. From time to time, waves of aircraft passed outside. The floor trembled at regular intervals, as if the entire planet were coughing.

Orithya was no longer just a world at war. It was a world that had learned to organize war as a structure of existence, as an economy, as a sentimental education, as a language.

At dawn, Lyris woke up first.

She saw him asleep, still holding the tool he had used to repair the module's partition. In that irregular, vulnerable sleep, there was nothing of the soldier, nothing of the regime agent, nothing of the man hardened by propaganda.

He just seemed someone who had long been fixing things destined to break again.

Lyris watched him in silence and felt something give way inside her.

Not trust, not yet. But the sudden realization that, in an age ruled by suspicion, kindness had gained the scandalous force of a revolt.

Chapter II

The woman that came from Velarys

Lyris remained hidden in the module for six days.

Six days during which the outside world seemed to collapse with almost obscene speed. The official networks of Cerynth spoke of tactical victories. Those of Velarys of heroic resistance. Neutral observers called for truces while defense corporations recorded unprecedented profits. The city air grew heavier, the trade corridors emptier, public discourses more violent.

Elian came and went cautiously, bringing synthetic food, medical supplies, and civilian clothing salvaged from a decommissioned warehouse. At first, Lyris accepted every bit of help with the rigidity of someone who would rather bleed alone than be in debt to an enemy. But bodies, when they suffer, eventually force sincerity. The fever broke her. Pain stripped away her pride. In those difficult hours, Elian watched over her without insistence, with a discretion that struck her more than any grand gesture.

He did not interrogate her immediately. He did not use her as a source. He did not try to convince her that he was different from others.

Perhaps it was precisely this that undermined her distrust.

On the seventh day, Lyris managed to stand up without leaning against the wall. She approached the module’s only slit, which offered a view of a portion of dirty sky and a fragment of Cerynth's peripheral towers.

“Your city seems to be built to keep everyone with their necks upwards.” she said.

Elian, who was calibrating a small purifier, smiled slightly. "That way, no one looks where they’re stepping.”

Lyris le le. “You often say dangerous things