Story
A captain takes a contract, and a small ship leaves everything familiar behind. Somewhere along its route, a settlement is living by rules the crew has never encountered. Another vessel lies silent with something still running inside. At the next port, a stranger may be looking for passage—or offering a reason to change direction entirely.
Sometimes you take a job because it is the only one available. You may never learn to love it, but leaving is something you cannot afford. Across Krakon, some people take the opportunity within reach. Others have no say in where they find themselves.
Above an unfamiliar planet, the crew waits for the captain to finish the calculations. Will there be a landing? Who will go?
Some hope never to hear their names. Others have spent so long inside the ship that almost any patch of solid ground would feel like a gift, provided the reports look safe enough. A few are eager even when they do not. There are crew members kept in storage specifically for dangerous assignments, ready to be awakened when those moments come.
But sometimes the captain's calculations favor someone else.
The descent may begin inside a cramped capsule, with barely enough room to bend your knees. Returning will require another decision, another expense, and someone above who still considers the journey worthwhile. Surviving the landing does not guarantee a place on the ship again.
You might even be left free—on a world where nobody would choose to spend that freedom.
Elsewhere, someone has a comfortable life aboard a station: a small business, familiar neighbors, and a lover with whom life fits together like the two halves of a seed. There are obligations, but also pleasures, plans, and reasons to be content.
Still, a rumor about somewhere far away refuses to leave them alone. They call it an opportunity to make their fortune. Perhaps that is part of the truth.
One half of the seed leaves for the unknown. The other waits, like a flower losing its petals.
On another world, a hero gives his life to protect his people—and discovers that he has done so before. A poem written for his beloved in his first life survives to reveal what he cannot remember.
Who stole my eternity
to give me another life to bleed through?
How many stars have they bought
with the stories of my sacrifice?
He believed the monsters were invading his home. Now he has reason to believe that neither he nor the monsters belonged there.
When he resists, the people he once defended are sent to destroy him.
Every song begins with a story.
In World
Near a black hole, fortunes grow. Across Krakon space, trillions build comfortable lives while millions chase treasure, distant worlds, and a story worth leaving behind.
Tales from Krakon gathers stories from distant corners of a vast universe, where different cultures and circumstances give life unfamiliar shapes. Some follow a voyage or a discovery. Others stay close to a friendship, a livelihood, or a decision whose consequences reach far beyond the person making it.
Among their characters are the least expensive crew members, whose brief lives are treated as expendable. A lifetime may burn like a candle with room for only one or two stories: one occupation, a handful of friendships, a few places that become familiar. Within that span, there is still time to develop a favorite pastime, fall out with someone, make plans, or find a reason to welcome the next day.
Other stories explore the ship as a whole small society. What do people worry about between destinations? How do friendships form, and what do they do for fun? A shared game, an argument, or an evening of music can fill corridors that seem empty from outside. What makes someone volunteer for a journey they may never return from? And why do so many funerals in space feel like celebrations held to see a friend off?
The practical details of travel shape these lives. Reaching a planet requires a physical descent. A common landing craft carries six people, and its rocket fuel takes up precious storage aboard the ship. Large vessels remain clear of planetary atmospheres; bringing one down may mean a catastrophic emergency landing.
Some captains choose cheaper drop capsules. Each holds a single occupant in an awkward crouch, relying largely on gravity for the journey down. Atmospheric braking and a parachute slow the fall; a short final burst of fuel softens the landing, while liquid cushions absorb much of the remaining impact. It is a violent, economical way to deliver someone to the surface.
Recovery costs more. A captain may decide against it even when the person below is still alive.
Stations offer other possibilities. Many residents are bound to a station through ownership arrangements established at birth or through debt, while running businesses of their own and contributing a share of their earnings. Their lives can include comfort, affection, ambition, and choices they value. Leaving may mean risking a happy existence for something they cannot quite explain to those who stay.
Then there are the local populations: people who may know nothing of the wider civilization moving around them. What happens when that knowledge reaches someone whose whole world has always ended at the sky?
Visitors conceal their origins, pursue interests within local societies, and operate under rules the inhabitants may never have heard of. The law against cultural contamination raises questions of its own: who enforces it, whom does it protect, and what happens to those who break it?
A visitor might arrive as a trader, a helper, or someone who seems entirely unremarkable. Elsewhere, arrivals from space may begin a campaign to wipe out a population. Discovering what brings them to each world—and what makes their conduct so different—is part of following the stories.
Across these encounters, something ordinary to one person can become another's treasure. Even a life already lived may hold a value its owner has never been allowed to know.
