Monotopia

The tentative fingers of the dawn crept across the shimmering, churning sea. It seeped through the windows of the floating houses, waking their inhabitants from their restless sleep. Days in Azaria were long and nights were even longer, especially with the looming threat of Rourke and the Domovoi Empire on the horizon.

The city's high priestess greeted the dawn with a troubled expression. The bombs had kept her up all night; she'd watched the skirmish between the Rourke airships and fleet and her own, which dwindled by the day. Aid from the other monotopias grew scarcer by the day, and at this rate Azaria would fall within the next few years, but that didn't mean they'd take their fate lying down.

In the central island's harbor, two girls in ragged clothing picked along the shore, searching for shells. One of the girls reached for a shiny scrap of metal washed ashore by the tides and the other grabbed her arm and dragged her away, shouting about sea mines. Their fathers cast off from the dock in their battered dinghy, listening to the wind whistle through the rips and tears in the canvas sails. Ashore, their mothers patched the nets that had been torn or lost by traps or explosives or just the usual chaos of life in Azaria.

On the outer edges, in the floating cities, a priest hopped from one raft to another. The wood creaked and groaned under his weight. He hardly paid it any mind, by now well used to the outer city's shoddy construction. He stopped before one of the floating houses and knocked gently on the outer wall. A man drew back the curtain substituting for a door and ushered the priest inside to deliver last rites to the man's partner, who lay dying from wounds inflicted by flying shrapnel and worsened by the malnutrition that plagued the city as a whole.

On the deck of one of the warships patrolling the city, a dark-haired woman clung to the rigging, staring out across the sea and listening for the distinct buzz of Rourke aircraft and the rumble of their ships. Their enemy was, on paper, much better armed than Azaria, but their knowledge of the sea was squalid and the hierarchies of their military built more on connections than merit. It wasn't enough to save the island, but it was enough to put up a fight, and by now most of the city had resigned themselves to their fate and hoped only to leave a defiant mark behind.

The city of Azaria reigned a little longer.