Field guide · Vol. VII
A survey of the Aureline Archipelago — nine inhabited rock-masses holding station between four and twenty-one thousand feet, and the people who keep them level.
Begin the ascentMarker 01
Uninhabited. Ringed by nesting sheerbirds and a permanent cap of freezing mist.
Orientation
Each stone is logged by altitude, not by distance. The gauge on the right is your position in the column; scroll and you climb.
08 400 ft · Holding
The largest inhabited stone, and the only one with soil deep enough for orchards.
Four hundred and twelve residents, most of them second- or third-generation ballast keepers. The terraces are pinned to the windward face with iron staves driven in 1974 and never once replaced.
08 900 ft
A chapel, a well, and eleven graves — the only stone that drifts counter to the prevailing current, for reasons no surveyor has settled.
chapelcounter-driftno landing
Marker 02
Forty metres across. One tree.
Ledger
Every stone runs a deficit or a surplus. Keepers trade mass across the archipelago by cable-lift.
12 900 ft · Conditions
Above twelve thousand feet the cloud deck stops being scenery and becomes infrastructure.
Keepers harvest it. Condensation nets strung between Kestrel Bight and the Ossary return roughly nine hundred litres on a good westerly — enough to keep both orchards and both wells honest through the dry months.
| Stone | Spring | High summer | Late year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verrow Shelf | 1 240 | 610 | 1 880 |
| Kestrel Bight | 900 | 430 | 1 410 |
| Little Ossary | 310 | 145 | 500 |
| Thimble | 40 | 12 | 66 |
Marker 03
Storm-scarred, magnetically unreliable. Compasses lie within 200 m.
Instrument
A stone at rest still moves. Three knots of lateral drift is nominal; above eight, the cable-lifts are cut and the archipelago spends a week apart.
Overheard
“We say out. Up is where the birds went. Out is where we live.” — Ovie Sarn, ballast keeper, Verrow Shelf, forty-one years on the stone.
17 600 ft · Passage
There are three ways across, and two of them are cables.
Marker 04
Two needles, joined below the cloud line. Never landed on.
Residency
Eight rooms let to surveyors, painters and the occasional meteorologist. Bring your own ballast; the stone will not carry you free.
8 roomsshared galleyno lift after dusk
Caution
A dead band of still air where nothing holds station. Cross it under power, never under sail, and never alone.
21 000 ft · Ceiling
No stone has ever been logged higher. The survey ends where the air stops arguing with us.
Marker 09
Sighted twice, in 1998 and 2027.
Subscribe
Vol. VIII covers the southern chain and the wreck at Grey Anvil. Two issues a year, printed on paper heavy enough to stay put.
Join the survey list