Static Crown
The desert hummed with old electricity. Not the kind that powered lights — the kind that haunted the bones of dead machines. Every dune was copper dust and iron teeth.
Vetra crouched by a half-buried transport, her goggles glowing faintly in the heat shimmer. The sand had eaten half the convoy, leaving only ribs of alloy and cables sticking out like veins.
Behind her, the Rustborn moved in silence, faces hidden under gascloth masks, each dragging scavenged carts filled with relics. Some sang — low, rhythmic, wordless hymns to keep the static spirits calm.
One of them, a young survivor named Rynn Callow, climbed up beside her. He wasn’t one of them — too clean, too soft, still wearing the marks of city life. But he’d earned his place. Barely.
“You said there’d be fuel,” Rynn said. “That engine’s dead.”
Vetra didn’t answer. She was tracing the lines on the machine’s hull — ancient runes carved by weather and time. “Engines don’t die,” she said softly. “They forget.”
She pressed her palm against the metal. Her augment sparked, bleeding a faint line of power into the wreck.
For a moment, the air smelled of ozone. The transport shuddered — once, twice — then went still.
Rynn stepped back. “That’s… impossible.”
“Not impossible. Faith.” Vetra reached into the machine’s guts and pulled out a blackened crown of wires — a neural interface once used to command convoy drones. “Static Crown,” she said, voice reverent. “Last of the line.”
“You think it’ll still work?”
“It doesn’t need to,” she said. “It just needs to believe.”
They made camp at sundown. The desert winds screamed like engines long gone. Vetra sat apart from the others, staring at the Crown in her lap. Sparks flickered along its coils — faint and pulsing, like a heartbeat.
Rynn approached, carrying a canteen. “We could sell it,” he said. “Buy our way north.”
Vetra looked at him through cracked lenses. “Sell it? You don’t sell what keeps you human.”
“It’s just junk, Vetra.”
“Then why are you afraid of it?”
Before he could answer, the storm came. A static surge, born from sand and lightning, rolling across the horizon like a wave of white noise. The Rustborn shouted in their half-machine tongues, covering their augments with tarps and prayercloths.
Vetra stood her ground, lifting the Crown high. Sparks leapt between its jagged wires, arcing into the storm. “Wake,” she whispered. “Remember.”
The wind screamed back.
For a second — just one — Rynn saw the wrecks around them light up, a thousand dead machines humming as if in chorus. Then came the flash — brilliant and red — and everything went dark.
When Rynn opened his eyes, the storm was gone. The camp was quiet. Only Vetra’s cloak remained, burned at the edges. The Crown lay where she’d stood — still warm, still humming.
He reached for it — and it shocked him. In his head, her voice whispered, distant but clear: “Keep the faith running, Rynn. Machines die when people stop believing.”
He slipped the Crown into his pack and turned toward the horizon, where faint lights blinked like fallen stars. And as he walked, the desert began to hum again.
