Chapter 1 - The Execution

The City to the Stars was only truly visible by night. By day the sprawling ruins were covered by the greenery and verdure of a place long lost to mankind. One might walk along the main boulevard never noticing that the stones that threatened to twist ankles were parts of a vast, straight stretch of road, never seeing the toppled buildings and over-grown by-ways along its sides; instead all too conscious of the weeds, the shadows, the aging trees that hung over it, that penetrated right through its foundations. To the sun, it was merely a tangled chaos, but to the stars, it was a city indeed.

And when the light of the moon shown down upon the tumbled remains of buildings long abandoned they gave form to half ruined walls and roofless structures, filling them out, giving them life, or at least a half-life of dreams. They lived again, seemingly, when the moon's silvery rays retraced their long broken lines in the darkness.

That is, until the boulevard found its way to the city's center. Here a great plaza, of the same flagstones as the road, opened up. Surrounding it on all sides were the crags of towers, thrusting upward, broken each as they reached the sky. Here at least man's work was unmistakable. No passage of time, even the millennia supposed to have passed, could mask the emptiness of the plaza, the heights of those shattered towers. Weeds had sprung up, even a few trees had pushed through the crumbling stones but still the city center maintained its sense of scale. Armies could have battled across it, and perhaps had.

The towers ringed the plaza, each of them many times the size of the tallest tree. Their jagged tops testified their collapse, and the heaps of crumbling stone, of twisting corroded metal at their bases proved it. The greatest tower of them all, that is the tallest, the widest, was called the God's Tower by the locals who revered at as a holy site. Their ancestors (for surely they were the descendants of those great men who came before) must have been great indeed to have built these structures, and this, the God's Tower, was surely the greatest of them all.

Of a height, it was unmatched. While the surrounding towers were each tall, this one dwarfed them all. On overcast days, its peak was hidden by the clouds. On clear days the peak, a thin jagged spire of one outer wall, would glow with the red of sunset long after the rest of the world fell into shadow. The tower was constructed entirely of steel, corroded, mottled, dangerous to come near. Occasionally a piece of metal would fall from above, shattering flagstones and anything else in its path. Men had been killed by the God's Tower, and men had died trying to recover the pieces of salvageable steel that chance (or the gods, or the ancestor's ghosts) might hurl their way. Those slain by the God's Tower were always honored by the townspeople, a great respect for those deemed worthy to return to the ancestral home, but the living still regarded the tower warily, and it was rare indeed for a holy man or steel smith to venture close enough for that chance honor.

The God's Tower was the holiest site in the City to the people of Dunmere. It was here, in this plaza, that the priests prayed for succor, for aid, for honor. And always they faced the Tower. The Tower, symbol of Ancestor, of Civilization, of Greatness gone from the world.