First time down here?
Aura-36 is three things stacked in one place: a novel that goes up chapter by chapter and stays free, a reference world you can dig through as deep as you want, and a community of readers who put themselves into it. You don't have to do all three. Pick a door.
Just read it
Book One, The Founder's Passing, opens on a mechanic drifting a weighted car down a mountain road at a third of Earth's gravity — and a three-second silence that shouldn't be possible. Eighty-five chapters are up. Nothing is paywalled.
Open Chapter One →Learn the place
Gravity, law, religion, the subterranean sectors, who runs what and who resents it. The Atlas maps it, the Codex explains it, the World Guide reads straight through like a field manual. Spoiler-light where it can be.
Open the Atlas →Move in
Pick a city, pick a job, write your citizen. Post to the deck below, argue about chapters in the forums, or take the Workshop and build a piece of Aura-36 that didn't exist until you thought of it.
Come aboard →To the books
Nine numbered works in three sets of three — three main-line books, three prequels (the building of the ship, the crossing, and the founding of the world) and three sequels — plus ten side stories outside the numbering. Book One is finished and free to read, permanently. No chapter has ever gone behind a paywall and none will. The full series map is here → · The side stories →
Books Two to Nine · Main line
All written
What Was Never Closed — four people hold an instrument that can open anything and close nothing, and nobody wrote the clause saying who watches them. 90 chapters. What Was Already Here — sixty years, and the two questions nothing before it is allowed to answer. 103 chapters. Then the Expansion Cycle (Books Four to Six) and the Reduction Cycle (Books Seven to Nine), 406 chapters more.
The Ark Cycle · Three prequels
All three written
The Keel — building the ship on a dying Earth, 55 chapters. The Long Crossing — ten people awake for a 36-year voyage, writing the laws of a world for a hundred thousand sleepers, 75 chapters. The First Breath — making the world survivable, 86 chapters. All three land on Chapter One. Read them after Book One, not before it.
Side stories · Eleven works
Outside the numbering
Eleven standalone stories, sized to their material rather than to a format — The Star Drifter, The Forty, The Sworn, The Space Pirates, The Bots That Stayed, The Sinks, Assumptions I Am Making, Standing Tasks, Banners And Wind, Carried, and Ghost-Built. Skip every one of them and you lose nothing load-bearing.
The Apocrypha — nineteen invented works, all written → All eleven side stories →
Beyond the page
Later — and honestly
The long-term hope is more than text: a video series, more playable pieces, art that isn't a placeholder box. None of it exists yet. When it does, it'll land here first.
Every book, one shelf
Every book and side story on one shelf, with an ePub and a manuscript on each.
Would you have been taken?
The recruitment programme that filled a hundred thousand berths, reissued unchanged. It tells you it's assessing you, then does.
Ten, outside the numbering
The edges of the world — one ship nobody listed, forty people with no way down, and a machine's task log that is the only record a family ever existed.
Nineteen works, none of them true
The second shelf — stories written by the people who live here. The ten side stories happened; nothing on this shelf did, and nothing on it can ever be cited as evidence.
The Story So Far
Every chapter compiled end to end. No controls, no chapter list — just the book.
One at a time
A single chapter per screen, with a jump grid. Better on a phone.
The Request Desk
A sport, a trade, a holiday, a place nobody has walked. Say what's missing and I'll build it.
The world itself
Aura-36 was built physics-first: 0.38g, an eighteen-hour night, a methane haze thick enough to hold a rear wing, and a society that answered the question of privacy by carving deliberate blind spots into its own surveillance. All of it is written down.
The Atlas
Surface cities, subterranean sectors, and one orbital ship — clickable, each with its lore and the chapters it shows up in.
The Codex
Forty-one sections on physics, law, faith, factions and technology — plus a log tying every established fact back to the chapter that established it.
The World Guide
Everything established so far, arranged to be read start to finish rather than searched.
The System
Where Aura-36 actually sits — the star, the orbit, the eighteen-hour night and why it's that long.
The Loom
The complete story bible and world codex, every system and mechanic set out in order. The deepest end of the pool.
The Rec Deck
Thirteen small games built out of things in the book — decrypt a manifesto, drift a touge, run a blind-spot maze.
Put yourself in it
This is the part that makes Aura-36 a place instead of a book. You don't need to be a writer. If you love something — a sport, a trade, a food, a machine, a way of arguing — the Workshop walks you through what that thing becomes at a third of Earth's gravity under an eighteen-hour night, and turns it into a proper entry in the world.
These are the working pages behind the site — drafting, publishing, backend setup, and the full file index. They aren't linked from the public navigation, but nothing has been removed or hidden: this panel reaches all of them, and each one is still a plain file in the folder you can open directly.