The sun didn’t rise over the city of ; it simply ignited. Built atop a floating shelf of white quartz suspended miles above the clouds, the city was known to the surface-dwellers as the "City of God." To its citizens, it was a gilded cage.
Looking over the edge of the floating plaza, Kael saw the world below. It was dark, chaotic, and scarred, but it was real . He looked back at the golden statues of the Priests and the sterile, unmoving perfection of his home. The city of God
Kael was a "Light-Tender," one of the few permitted to touch the Core—a pulsating orb of pure divinity that kept the city afloat and the gardens in eternal bloom. For centuries, the High Priests taught that the Core was a gift from a creator who had abandoned the "Sullied Earth" below to reward the pure. The sun didn’t rise over the city of ; it simply ignited
"Let me fall," it whispered. "The weight of their perfection is crushing me." It was dark, chaotic, and scarred, but it was real
Kael realized then that the City of God wasn't powered by a miracle, but by a . The "God" they worshipped wasn't an absent creator; it was a living entity being drained like a battery to keep the marble streets clean and the wine flowing.
The city didn't plummet. It began a slow, graceful descent. As the white towers pierced the cloud layer for the first time in an epoch, the "God" at the center stopped weeping. The golden light faded, replaced by the warm, messy orange of a natural sunset.
With a heavy heart and a steady hand, Kael didn't perform the nightly maintenance. Instead, he reversed the polarity of the stabilizers.
