Morning mist clung to the cliffs while gulls circled overhead, their cries swallowed by the rhythmic pulse of waves. The Arcane rose before dawn, not for drills or scouting reports, but to undertake something utterly foreign to soldiers of the Diamond Authority: they would build a home.
Seraphine surveyed the crescent beach below the landing ridge. Gold sand shimmered between tide‑pools and sun‑bleached rock. Behind her the forest climbed in tiers of pine and live oak, and Earth's damp scent of brine and moss filled her lungs—an aroma she had never catalogued in thousands of years of conquest.
Citrine projected a pale‑amber schematic in the air, her tablet flickering with new measurements. She had worked through the night, adjusting designs to blend cliffstone, driftwood, and salvaged gem‑tech struts. "Anchor points there, there, and there," she said, tapping three bright nodes. "Two levels for now. We expand once the buttresses fuse."
Onyx hefted a slab of metamorphic stone as easily as a pillow. "Point and I drop," she grunted, biceps gleaming like polished obsidian. Amara guided glowing sea‑vines from her palms; they slithered over stone pillars, eager to root once sunlight touched them. Jinx cartwheeled across the sand, limbs stretching impossibly long, then snapped into place to hammer brackets. Each swing of her mallet was punctuated by a burst of laughter and a rhyme she made up on the spot about "beachy breezy easy peasy."
Oni squinted at the cliff face, a satchel of scavenged tools clinking at his hip. "We'll need a pulley system," he muttered, already calculating angles. "I can gut the ship's cargo winch."
Lapis stood apart, ankle‑deep in the surf, watching the tide breathe in and out. She spoke rarely, yet Seraphine felt her quiet attention like a deep current under calm water.
Work unfolded with the rising sun. Onyx shaped boulders with ringing blows that sent gulls wheeling. Citrine redrew lines every time a stray wave erased them, and Amara wove living roots around the pillars so rock and vine fused into seamless columns. Seraphine guided without barking orders. Once, she paused, caught by how dawn light refracted through embedded crystals and painted her armor with colors she had never noticed on any battlefield.
Jinx stretched rubber‑like to fetch driftwood thirty meters down‑shore, then coiled tall to affix metal ribs. Her cartoon physics—elastic, unpredictable, and full of playful exaggeration—made Oni laugh despite himself, and the sound surprised everyone. By midday a skeletal frame hugged the cliff, half alien metal, half living Earth.
Later, Oni showed them a firepit design, explaining how humans gather warmth and light. The gems stared in awe when he struck a match. "It consumes to live?" Amara whispered.
"It breathes," Oni said. "Like everything else here."
They didn't eat, but they sat with him around the fire as it crackled. Jinx mimicked the flames with spindly dance‑moves, flickering orange across her body. Citrine held a thermometer to the fire and adjusted her internal heat matrix to match. Onyx reached a hand into the flame and declared it "a worthy opponent."
Jinx reenacted scenes from a human comic book she'd found, her body stretching into absurd proportions—eyes bugging, legs noodle‑long, fists ballooning with each punchline. Her elastic design, once meant for infiltration and chaos, now turned silly and endearing. Even Seraphine chuckled, something rare and startling.
Oni started teaching them about Earth customs. How humans sleep. Why they paint. What a hug is. Most of the Arcane found these ideas alien or irrelevant. Lapis, too wise and distant, dismissed hugs as "exchanges of warmth that end in confusion." Citrine took notes but warned that "these rituals lack logic." Amara, however, tried mimicking everything with fascination. Onyx grumbled but let Oni demonstrate sleeping positions on a makeshift cot. Jinx, naturally, declared herself an expert after watching five minutes of a cartoon and immediately tried to snore with comical exaggeration.
As weeks became months, the home took shape—a fused stone and wood structure clinging to the cliffside like a tree grown sideways. Bioluminescent herbs lit the stairwells. Water recycled through root‑pumps. Rooms grew organically as vines responded to need, not blueprint. It was unlike anything the Diamonds had ever approved.
At summer's end, they held a lantern festival. Though the gems didn't fully understand its purpose, Oni explained: "You write a wish. You let it go."
None of them had wishes. But they built the lanterns.
Jinx floated hers skyward while balancing upside down on her pinky toe. Onyx launched hers like a javelin. Citrine analyzed wind speed before releasing. Amara whispered to hers before letting it go. Seraphine released hers last—and didn't look away.
High above, the lanterns glowed against the Milky Way. They drifted past Lapis, who hovered on a water spiral, playing notes on a harp made of ocean filaments. It wasn't celebration—it was something closer to reverence.
Deep in the cliffside lab, Oni and Citrine calibrated a beacon to redirect whale migrations. Its core used a dormant Diamond transmitter.
"Looped through a dampener," Oni assured her. "Isolated pulse. Won't trigger anything."
The violet light flickered harmlessly.
But light, even quiet light, travels.
Three galaxies away, Inigo Diamond's surveillance grid blinked once. Topaz Diamond watched it silently. "There," she whispered. "There they are."
That night, Lapis stood on the balcony, still as stone, and felt the tremor ripple through her gemstone. The Diamonds were stirring.
"We have one year," she said, to no one but the stars.
The wind shifted. The tide pulled harder. The house stood tall behind her—still unfinished, but glowing.
The Arcane didn't know it yet.
But the clock had started ticking.