THE LIGHT MILE BALLISTA
A Lore Primer for Star-Cavern Keepers, Crownhold Dockhands, & the Sailors Who Swear They Saw a Whale Become Ammunition
The day Julius Applebottom decided he needed whale heart-valves, Orren Vale said the sensible thing:
“A Leviathan? In a skiff? With a dog?”
Dr. Mako said the practical thing:
“Harvest it in the dark, or die where you stand.”
And Julius said the Julius thing:
“I won’t haul it back. I’ll lead it to the Light Mile, kill it in the slipstream… and shoot it into Mid-Axis.”
That is how the tale begins, and how most people stop listening—
because sane minds reject stories that sound like a joke told by a drowning man.
But Crownhold Sink learned something that week:
Some jokes are engineering proposals.
The Star Caverns are not a place you “travel to.”
They are a place you fall into, like a secret the ocean regrets keeping.
Millions of bioluminescent colonies paint the black water into constellations. Up and down lose meaning. Depth becomes religion. And somewhere in that cathedral drifts a living galleon:
A Star Cavern Leviathan (CR 20)
Five hundred heartbeats’ worth of flesh. Crystal-spined back encrusted with volatile mineral clusters. Blindsight that makes hiding a rumor. A maw big enough to turn a ship into a swallowed prayer.
Passive… until you convince it you are food, threat, or insult.
And Julius came to do all three.
The plan was never to win a fair fight.
A fair fight is how veteran sailors die and then get called “brave.”
Julius and Love (the ant born from the Siddhi pearl’s overflow) designed a different kind of hunt:
Not a spear-hunt. A lead-hunt.
Step One: Make the Whale Choose You
Not by stabbing it—by promising it motion.
Julius used what he always uses when the sea refuses to cooperate: audacity shaped into method.
He bled a controlled ribbon of resonance smoke into the water—thin, bright, insultingly alive in the light-eating dark. He didn’t flood the cavern with power. That would be suicide. He offered a trail, a moving constellation—something the Leviathan could “see” with more than eyes.
Love corrected the rhythm in Julius’s head like a tutor slapping a ruler:
“Too loud and it attacks. Too soft and it ignores.
Make it curious. Curiosity is just hunger wearing manners.”
The Leviathan turned.
Not fast. Not angry.
Interested.
That is worse.
The Light Mile is a current that does not “flow.”
It fires.
It is eight hundred miles an hour of shearing water—fast enough to tear steel into ribbons if you enter wrong, and fast enough to turn a leviathan carcass into pink fog if you spill blood too early.
Love plotted the entry angles in Julius’s mind like geometry drawn with needles.
Orren’s warning echoed from memory:
“If you time the entry wrong, you won’t shoot the whale into Mid-Axis.
You’ll puree it. And yourself.”
Julius listened to the math.
Then he added the other half of himself—the half that survived Axis III in a skiff by treating death like a negotiable clause:
He committed to a lead that no responsible captain would attempt.
For two hours, the Love Pirates did the impossible dance:
close enough to keep the Leviathan engaged,
far enough to avoid a single bite turning the skiff into a swallowed coffin,
quiet enough to not trigger a full charge,
loud enough to stay the only “star” worth following.
It was not heroic.
It was surgical recklessness.
And the closer they got to the Light Mile, the more the ocean tried to punish them for arrogance.
A tail’s wake could have snapped the skiff in half.
A mineral eruption could have shredded the cockpit like paper.
One mistake would have written their names into the cavern wall in red.
They did not make the mistake.
This is the part the dockhands argue about.
Some swear Anex—the coyote pearl beast—was just “a big dog.”
Others insist the animal was a weapon that hadn’t learned its own safety yet.
Both are true.
Because Anex had power.
What Anex lacked was combat wisdom—the sense to choose the right moment without being told.
And Julius finally told him.
When the Leviathan drifted too close—when its vast shadow blotted out the star-colonies and the skiff’s hull began to sing under pressure—Julius didn’t fight it like a sailor.
He commanded it like a captain with a hunting hound.
One sharp order. One pointed hand. One absolute tone that meant now.
Anex launched.
Not at the maw. Not at the crystals.
At the control.
A full-sized leviathan doesn’t get “wrestled.”
It gets redirected—its motion stolen, its angle ruined, its confidence broken for a second.
Anex hit like a living anchor—clamping, bracing, dragging with brute instinct and pearl-muscle strength that most men never believe until they see it.
It wasn’t elegant.
It was effective.
And in that moment, the Love Pirates learned the truth:
Anex is not “smart in battle.”
Anex is a storm that needs a hand on the wheel.
They did not kill it in the cavern.
They delivered it to the Light Mile like presenting an offering to a god that only respects speed.
The last approach was a knife-edge: the Leviathan surging, the skiff threading the boundary, Love counting micro-timings, Julius smiling like a man who should be in chains.
Then they crossed the point of no return.
The Light Mile grabbed the water like it was angry.
And Julius made the decisive choice:
not a long battle, not a heroic exchange—
a surgical strike meant to end the whale where momentum would do the hauling.
That is why Dr. Mako’s flensing knife mattered.
Standard steel doesn’t cut leviathan gristle.
Shark-tooth diamond does.
They opened what they needed—heart-valves—fast, clean, brutal.
And the moment the Leviathan died, the current became what Julius promised it would be:
A cannon.
A ballista.
A launch.
The carcass—massive as a galleon, crystal-spined and bleeding starlight—was taken by the Light Mile and fired toward Mid-Axis like ammunition with a heartbeat’s memory.
They say the dock cranes near the War Chamber drop-off groaned like beasts.
They say the net-rigs snapped twice before they held.
They say Mufasa himself watched without speaking, because even kings know when they’re witnessing a new kind of piracy.
And they say Orren Vale—shipwright, realist, reluctant believer—only managed one sentence:
“Physics-wise… it’s sound.
Terrifyingly sound.”
The Star Caverns still glitter like a false sky.
The Light Mile still shears steel like paper.
But now, when sailors whisper about them, the story has an extra clause:
“If you see a skiff running the Light Mile with a coyote on the prow—
don’t follow.
That’s not a crew escaping.
That’s the Love Pirates loading the ocean itself into a weapon.”
If you want, I can format this into your usual numbered “Primer Sections” and add named maneuver calls (the exact commands Julius uses for Anex, the three “entry angles” Love calculates, and the official name for this tactic in-world: The Light Mile Ballista / Whale-Shot / Star-Carcass Launch).