Elias Tobias Rocha

Stone and Rockfruit

Elias Tobias Rocha was born on 9 March 1996 in Dunwich, a farming and quarrying town on the plains near the Caves of Xylora, the second of three sons of Tobias Rocha and Mira Rocha (née Vale). He was born in Clivilius, as his parents and grandparents had been, and grew up knowing nothing of Earth beyond the occasional rumour that drifted down the caravan routes from Xylora.

The Rochas had cut stone in Dunwich for four generations. Tobias ran a small family quarry on the cliffs east of the town, working the hard, warm-coloured rock that Dunwich used for its walls, its market square, and its terraced rockfruit fields, and selling dressed stone to farmers and to the occasional buyer from Xylora. Mira's family, the Vales, were among the town's founders, and she kept a share of the old Vale rockfruit terraces that had fed Dunwich for most of its history. The household lived between the two, in a stone house at the edge of the fields that Elias's great-grandfather had built.

His elder brother, Daniel Rocha, was born on 2 November 1992, and his younger brother, Matteo Rocha, on 21 August 1999. Daniel was steady, patient, and destined from childhood to take over the quarry. Matteo was the family's charmer. Elias, in between, was the restless one, a boy who learned to split stone along its grain by the age of ten and spent much of the rest of his childhood asking what lay beyond the plains.

The Cliffs

Dunwich was small, and its schooling was practical. Elias learned to read, reckon, and keep accounts at the town school, and learned everything else on the cliffs and in the fields. By sixteen he was working full days in the quarry beside his father and brother, cutting, splitting, and dressing stone by hand, and he had developed a reputation in the town for the finest finish of any mason his age.

He was also, by then, increasingly bored. Dunwich in the early 2010s was a quiet town that had changed little in a generation, and the young people who left it for Xylora seldom came back. Elias felt the pull of the wider world without having any clear idea of where it led. His father regarded the restlessness as a phase. His mother, who knew her son better, regarded it as a matter of time.

Rumours from the River

News of the settlement at Bixbus reached Dunwich slowly in 2018 and 2019, carried by traders from Xylora: a new town on the river, built by people who had come from somewhere else entirely, growing at a speed that made no sense. The stories were contradictory and, to most in Dunwich, faintly ridiculous. Elias listened to all of them.

By 2021 the stories had become harder to dismiss. Bixbus was buying stone, timber, and food from across the region, and the rail line being built towards Xylora promised to bring it within a day's travel. When the Bixbus to Xylora Rail Link opened in early 2022, Elias was among the first of Dunwich's young people to take it. He travelled to Xylora by caravan with a bag of tools and a letter of introduction from a Xylora trader his father dealt with, and rode the new line to Bixbus from there.

His father did not stop him, but did not see him off either. Tobias regarded his son's departure as a desertion of the family trade at the very moment the quarry most needed hands, and the two of them did not speak properly for most of a year. Mira wrote to her son every month.

A Stranger in the City

Bixbus astonished him. It was louder, faster, and stranger than anything he had imagined, full of people from a world he had heard of only in rumours, building towers in months that would have taken Dunwich a generation. He found work within a week as a stonemason on the city's growing public buildings, where his ability to read stone by eye and split it cleanly by hand set him apart from crews used to machine-cut material.

He was also, for the first time in his life, a foreigner. Many of the Earth-born settlers treated native Clivilians with a curiosity he found either flattering or wearing depending on the day, and he spent his first months correcting assumptions about where he came from and what he knew. He learned their words for things, some of their food, and a great deal about how little they understood of the land they had built on.

Jenna

Later in 2022 he was assigned to a new public square where a set of timber benches by the woodworker Jenna Drake were to sit on bases of his stone. They disagreed about the height of the bases, the finish of the stone, and the way the timber met it, and argued about all of it for three weeks. The benches were very good. By the time they were installed, the two were seeing each other.

Jenna was the first Earth-born person Elias came to know well, and much of what he understood about the settlers he learned from her: the grief so many of them carried, the strangeness of a sky without familiar stars, and the anger of people who had not entirely chosen to come. She, in turn, found in him someone for whom Clivilius was simply home. He showed her how to find water on the plains, which plants could be eaten, and how the light shifted through the Clivilian year.

In 2023, when the rail line was extended through the Caves of Xylora to Dunwich and cliffstone began to arrive in Bixbus in quantity, Elias became one of the first masons in the city to work it. He knew the stone, knew the quarries, and knew most of the men who cut it, and he quietly steered a share of the new trade towards his father's quarry. Tobias came to Bixbus for the first time that summer to see what his son had made of himself, and the two of them made a kind of peace over a pile of Rocha stone on a building site by the river.

Family

Elias and Jenna married in October 2023 in the garden behind her workshop by the river, under an arch she had built. His parents and both his brothers came in on the new line from Dunwich, and Jenna's father, Boyd Drake, and brother, Ethan, stood with them. It was the first time most of the Rochas had met people from Earth, and the evening was awkward until Matteo and Ethan discovered a shared interest in drinking, after which it was not.

The couple began to take commissions together, Jenna's timber and Elias's stone, and their work became known for joins so clean that clients ran their hands along them to find them. Their daughter, Alina Grace Rocha, was born at the Royal Bixbus Hospital on 14 June 2024. Elias rearranged his work to be at home in the mornings in her first year, which his father regarded as eccentric and his mother as entirely proper.

Fatherhood brought its own tensions. Jenna's grief for her mother sharpened after Alina's birth, and Elias, whose family were all alive and a day's journey away, struggled at times to understand it. He learned to be present rather than to fix things, a lesson that did not come naturally to a man who had spent his life making stone do what he wanted.

Between Two Places

By 2026 Elias was thirty, a father, and one of the best-known stonemasons in Bixbus. He travelled to Dunwich several times a year, to see his parents, to choose stone at the quarry Daniel now ran, and to take Alina to her grandmother's rockfruit terraces. He belonged, he sometimes said, to two places that were each a little suspicious of the other, and he had stopped expecting either to fully understand him.