One of the things I knew early about the Eyonimics, the species at the center of Axiom Flux, is that they don’t love the way humans or Amaiy’s own people, the Yatomites, do. Eyonimic love is communal. Polyamorous by default, not as a subversion of a “normal” monogamous baseline, but simply as how the culture works. Nobody in Eyonim is scandalized by it. It’s not a taboo being pushed against. It’s just Tuesday.
That was a deliberate choice, and it came with a harder design question than “let people love more than one person.” The harder question was: what keeps a culture like that from falling apart? If love is freely given and nobody’s bound to exclusivity, what stops it from just being chaos, or worse, a system where the loudest and most charismatic people hoard affection and everyone else goes without?
The answer I landed on was that Eyonimic love needed real consequences for being taken for granted. Daimun says it plainly at one point: we give free, we receive free. That’s not just a nice sentiment, it’s load-bearing. Generosity is the currency. And the flip side of that currency is that selfishness, taking love without reciprocating it, treating people as options rather than people, has a real cost. Not a moral lecture from a narrator. A social one. The community itself withdraws.
That’s what happens to Yeyi. She isn’t punished by fate or by any single character’s cruelty. She’s rejected by the actual mechanism the culture uses to keep itself healthy: when she treats Amaiy’s genuine, if imperfect, offer of Eyonimic love with contempt, the people around her stop extending grace, because that’s what the system is built to do to someone who won’t participate in good faith. I wanted that to feel less like punishment and more like a natural immune response, harsh, maybe, but not arbitrary.
I want to be careful about one thing, because I think it’s easy to misread: I didn’t write Eyonimic love to be better than the exclusive, monogamous love Amaiy grew up with as a Yatomite. It’s not a thesis that polyamory beats monogamy. It’s healthy for Eyonimics specifically, because it’s the structure that matches who they are and what they need from each other. Amaiy spends a lot of the book caught between two entirely valid frameworks for what love is supposed to mean, and he doesn’t fully abandon his Yatomite instincts even as he learns to live inside the Eyonimic ones. That tension is the point. I didn’t want either framework to win. I wanted them to sit next to each other and make each other more visible.
The thing I found most interesting to write, honestly, wasn’t the romance, it was the architecture underneath it. Assumption, the permanent bonding ritual Eyonimics use, isn’t just a nice ceremony. It’s genuinely irreversible, ending only in death, and it can be stacked in groups of three for real, tangible power, shared knowledge, deepened ability, a literal merging of consciousness. Love, in this world, isn’t just an emotional state. It’s infrastructure. It does things. That gave me a lot more to work with than “these two characters have feelings for each other,” because now every relationship in the book is also a structural choice with consequences attached, which, if I’m honest, is a pretty good description of what love actually is anywhere, once you look closely enough.