About

What this is

Skylake is a single-author fiction project. It takes the form of an archive kept by an observatory on the shore of a lake that holds no water, and it is written as that archive would be written: entries for the objects, tales for the people, and a set of standing orders that neither is allowed to break.

The setting is original. It is not affiliated with any existing work, organisation, or shared universe, and it does not use anyone else's terms. If you are looking for the rules that hold it together, they are in the Standing Orders, and the short version is on the last clause: no observation that did not cross the interface, and an object is evidence, not a conduit.

anonylake

Everything here is written by anonylake. The optics are real optics — Brewster's angle, escape cones, refractive discontinuities — and are used as accurately as the fiction allows. Where a number is wrong, it is a mistake rather than a liberty, and it is worth telling me about.

How it is built

Hand-written HTML and one stylesheet. No JavaScript, no webfonts, no images, no analytics, no cookies, no third-party requests of any kind. Type is set in whatever book serif your device already has, with a monospace for anything an instrument would have produced.

A page here is a few kilobytes and loads in one round trip. That is not an aesthetic position, or not only one: a site about looking at things through a very thin medium ought to be thin.

The site follows your system's light or dark setting. If you have reduced motion turned on, the reflection under each title holds still.

Using this

All text is published under CC BY-SA 3.0. You may copy it, translate it, and build on it, including commercially, provided you credit anonylake and release what you make under the same licence.

If you write in this setting, the strata are yours to use. Keep the two rules. They are the whole load-bearing structure, and an entry that breaks them stops being part of this archive and becomes something else.