Adult Sci-fi: Saints' Scales

35 Word Pitch: After the Church burns Quil’s home, he abandons the ashes in search of justice. Now, Librarian-Priests hunt him through paper-deserts for a stolen secret. Unless he survives, the chthonic Archives and its machine-gods will die.

Genre: Adult Sci-fi

Title: SAINTS' Scales

Word Count: 108,000

Special Question: If your main character could be any Star Wars character, who would they choose and why? Jocasta Nu. Quil's mentor was also a bad-ass Librarian. He could think of worse things than ending up like her.

First 250 words: Quil lifted loose pages to his nose and breathed in the scent of the wide, rolling Sheets. It was dust and rot and nothing else for long miles, nothing but paper below his feet and stone high above his head.

He placed the leaves back, noting where they had rested, and shifted on his haunches as he considered.

The paper in this tract of the vast, empty Sheets was old, laid by a little saint decades ago and not yet revisited. A narrow line of disturbed leaves marred that wider flow of text. It looked like a trail made by the feet of another human, but he couldn’t imagine why a man or woman might have been here alone. It would be a hard thing, trying to survive in this gloom without the safety of the nomadic little saints and the towns upon their backs.

“Where are you going?” 

He ran a hand through his tangle of ruddy-black hair. To follow further or not? He had traced this path for the last twenty minutes. It meandered with the curve of the dunes, heading toward the distant Hub, the centre of the Archives. He’d seen no one from Wilde pass this way, and he hadn’t expected to; he was one of its furthest ranging inhabitants. Was the trail old then, or could someone be wandering lost even now, stumbling until they dropped to the paper?

He had the time.