The Everburning City

Title Crawl (And a Map)

There is no night in the Everburning City. There can never be.

The world beyond the City is lost, drowned beneath a corpse-grey mist that lies over every inch of the horizon. A pallid, dense fog that drowns sunlight and smothers crops, it has waited just beyond the outermost walls for three and a half centuries.

Men call this mist the Gloam.

Beneath the Gloam there is no life. Stone crumbles into dust, trees stand petrified as tombstones to lost forests, and the ambitions of empires lie in ruin. To walk within the Gloam is to stand where there is no sun, to breathe without air, to live where the world wishes humanity dead.

And it besieges the Everburning City still.

The Gloam respects no border or boundary. Rivers do not hold its march, distance does not deter its advance, and only the peaks of high mountains rise above it. Fire, and fire alone, will halt the Gloam.

But no fire on earth can burn forever. To find their salvation, the founders of the Everburning City called upon the Crafters, people both gifted and cursed with a will that can command the flame, to bore a hole through the earth and reach to the fires below. Their temerity created the Spire, a lance of fire that pierces the sky and cleaves the clouds that pass. And by the fires of this abyssal wound the Gloam has been held back for centuries.

The City has held, and even grown, despite this generations long siege. Through famine and civil war, disasters and invasions, millions are now sheltered behind fire and stone.

But dusk marches from beyond the outermost walls with footsteps that crack like thunder. And should night fall upon the City, dawn will be greeted by an empty world.

Every inch of the City has been claimed by stone and held by fire. But the City's centuries are paid in courage and sacrifice.

*****

Hello, and welcome to The Everburning City! Or welcome back, since at least some of you started in earlier books. Not earlier chronologically, but I wrote them before this one.

But this particular story is where I want to start the story of the Everburning City. If you're starting here, you're welcome to just cling to these chapters, or you can jump ahead to one of the others. Spoilers will abound, obviously.

But to you, new or returning reader, I wanted to say thanks. Doubly so if you're one of those people who willingly paid to read The Dragon Chase on an app stuffed full of interesting free work. I would not have been working on these still without you, and this tale in particular would probably never exist.

This one won't be short. And it won't be quick. But I'll do my damndest to make it worth your time.

Thanks again, and burn brightly.

Gordon

*****

This is the City. You can see the river the city is built around, the amount of farmland the City has claimed to feed itself, and the Gloam surrounding it. For a sense of scale, the City itself is a little larger than New York, and the total mass of land the City and its surround farmland sits on is about the size of Iceland. The distance between one layer of the wall and the next is roughly ten miles.