Thassilon wakes to a thinner day. On the harbor’s Sky Lantern, the yellow band—a spectrum that feeds bread-vines and medicinals—has been shaved by a hair no storm can explain. Peacewright Havilah Rhee steps off the ferry with a single aim: prove the theft, then mend the cause. Beside her is Silas Kepler, a navigator who keeps beams true, and Aio Anselm, a Praxis auditor who makes courts hate theater. They open the instruments to the street. A public lattice splits the sun from what shutter consoles claim, citizen patches stamp open signatures on trellises, and a forum under woven lenses weighs numbers in daylight. As bread runs thin and patience thinner, corporate counsel calls it drift. Procurement calls it optimization. The harbor calls it hunger. A friendly traveler arrives with a paste-module and a book of vouchers—relief in exchange for blindness. Silas refuses. Sabotage follows: waveguides that fake weather, timing shims hidden in relay mounts, late mirrors spliced into window film. The city answers with witness: panes turned into projectors, angles published on walls, children reading hashes off school chalkboards. In the heat of a thousand small fixes, alliances shift. Surface Ops engineer Daniel Reeve steps into the light; an Umbra analyst crosses the floor; and a dinner with executives ends with a confession, restitution, and a charter no one can quietly wriggle past. Rhea Marden—the harbor’s stone-steady chief—backs the audit as Aio teaches the law to read a spectral ledger. The chase doesn’t end in a shootout, but in a clause—quiet, permanent, poisonous—that would have sold daylight by fractions forever. It is signed… until the forum reads the hash aloud and the room goes still. Mirrors rehung. Waveguides unspliced. The yellow band fills like a lung. Bread returns. More important, the city writes a custody chain for public light and vows that brightness will never again be a private ledger line. THE THOUSANDFOLD DAWN is solarpunk for readers who want honest tools and earned hope—engineering as plot, community as protagonist, and justice you can taste in a loaf.
Genre: Science Fiction
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Avery North's The Thousandfold Dawn