The Eighth City: A Torch in the Darkness

The Eighth City: A Torch in the Darkness

  By R.C. Champagne

  Illustrated by: Trish Vosburg

  Copyright 2013

  This book is dedicated to Victoria, Lauren, and Trish.

  I owe each of them thanks beyond measure. They are my marketing, editing, and illustrating team (respectively) and without them this book would never have been published. They supported me and aided me far beyond the roles that I asked them to fill. It has long been my dream to write professionally and to see my work in print and I owe each of you the most heartfelt of thanks for making it possible to see one of my greatest dreams come true.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Map

  A Torch in the Darkness

  Illustration

  About The Author

  Connect Online

  A Torch in the Darkness

  The Clockwork City. The Metal Giant. The Raised City. The Chosen of the Twelve. The City of Time. The Eighth City.

  The flickering of massive furnaces and reaching spires of twisted metal mark what had once been the greatest of the Twelve Cities of the Enlightened Continent. Long ago, the city was surrounded by a fertile valley, but Time has passed on. Now a ring of dust and hard-packed ground spreads outwards from the industrial city like a growing blight. Once, gently waving grass had grown beneath the eaves of the cities floor, surrounding the graceful columns that held the entire city high above the landscape. The explanation for why the city was raised up off of the ground has been lost to Time but the denizens of the decaying city had found advantage to its structure by depositing their refuse and debris into the Below beneath them. Now, where grass once grew, gray sludge and mounds of discarded treasure oozed out beyond the boundaries of the city itself.

  Even so, wealth and technology of ages past still hangs in the shadows of the twisting towers at the center of the city. There had been a time when the ever-turning gears that powered the cities buildings shone brightly in the sun, but now they creak and groan under the strain of use and lack of care. The great smiths and machinists of Eight had been legendary throughout the Enlightened Continent, attracting trade from cities as far away as Three. Inventions like the powerful Blackpowder and Autogarden spread like wildfire from their inception in the laboratories of The Clockwork City. Even he Reborn, outcast cults of the city Five, traveled to Eight. They came secretly but rumor suggests that it was with the intention of crafting some device that combined their mystic powers with the technology of Eight’s craftsmen.

  Nine and Seven to the North and Southeast grew fat and prosperous on the travel and trade that passed through them on the way to Eight, and there was peace among them. The mines to the Northeast had seemed an inexhaustible source of coal and unrefined iron, the lifeblood of Eight. But the mines had run dry and the men who work them now are little more than slaves. Trade vanished, and hostilities passed between Eight and its neighbors. In the crowded markets of the Metal Giant, rumors of war with the Nine abound. Time has moved on, the people say woefully, and there is nothing one can do about it. Time has indeed moved on, and something more sinister has taken its place.

  In the Outer City the edges of the slums and the affluence of the city mixed. There the famous Lamps of Eight once lined the streets in a steady march towards the Inner City. In their time, each one was a bright point of fire, shedding light on wide avenues where trees and carefully cultivated bushes bloomed in the night from their iron containers. The lamps of Eight, powered by a mysterious network of gas pipes, were one of the greatest wonders of the City of Time. Visiting engineers could only guess at their design. But so close to the slums the cultivated shrubbery and glittering lamplight on the curved streets had all but disappeared. Only a few lamps still flickered lifelessly while the rest were broken stumps, their craftsmanship destroyed so that the metal might be salvaged.

  On one of these dark streets, where the working men of poor means make their homes, lives a boy. A boy with strange dreams.

  His home was not far from the slums, a strange and crowded place. The slums were not originally in the design for the city instead, as the city grew more and more crowded, new structures were haphazardly welded onto the already sagging edges. A naturally vicious life awaits all who inhabit these teeming slums where a scrap of tin is more valuable than Time itself. Few there fear death. The threat of death is an old companion for those who were raised to the sound of popping rivets and groaning metal, signaling the eventual collapse of the metal beneath their feet and a fatal fall to the earth below. Superstition rules these ghettos, and garishly painted shamans rule the minds of the people. They wander the streets selling charms of human bone, claiming they are true wood from beyond the city’s great ramps.

  A short walk from these teeming death traps the architecture changes dramatically from corrugated tin lean-to’s into identical grey box homes with a single floor and a thin steel door. These utilitarian homes had been built when massive complexes of stacked and spacious apartments were being constructed all over the Inner City. The builders had hoped the privacy of a single floor and distance from the political life of the Inner City would attract rich buyers. But the buyers never came; they had no interest in a home with only a single, narrow hallway that connected to a bare living room, cramped kitchen, and two small bedrooms. So they became homes to the soot-coated workers of the Bellows who saved hard earned money all their lives for a piece of the Inner City dream.

  Before the fireplace in the living room of house 4762, the son of a soot-coated Bellows worker was sitting on a threadbare rug and thinking about his dream. It had been coming to him night after night and he was wondering what it could mean. He turned it over in his mind as if it were a physical object, examining every angle of it, studying its shape. He carefully looked over every piece and tried to see how it fit in the whole, striving to understand its function. Before him was a book filled with bright pastel illustrations of fire and a hard faced man with a white stripe through his hair. “Tinder: Hero of Flame,” the front proclaimed, “In this issue the Ice Ranger must face her greatest challenge yet to rescue the captured hero!”

  His unfocused eyes drifted over the illustration of a woman clothed in blue and crowned by ice as his thoughts floated down other streams. She was casting bright shards of merciless ice at goblin foes, her face aglow with battle lust. But the boy was not thinking about her heroics; rather, he was distracted by thoughts of a dream that always began the same way...

  He watched with one eye; his other was closed, having been crushed into the dirt he had collapsed on. The man, wearing a neat vest and slacks, was moving away from him. The battle was over, and he had lost. His opponent was walking away. His ragged breath caused bursts of dust to fly into the air, clouding his eyes. The grainy sand felt rough on his teeth and he struggled to see.

  Beyond the clouds of dust he watched the man stop and look intently at a pocket watch he had pulled from the vest. His shoulders slumped in despair and the pocket watch made a sharp snap as it was violently closed and stuffed back into the vest. An angry roar erupted from the man before he continued his steady tread away from the battleground.

  He tried to lift his head from the ground to get a final glimpse of the man who had defeated him, but dizziness swooped upon him and a face swam before his eyes - her face. Suddenly, the mysterious man was gone from his consciousness. She was saying something, her beautiful features moving with compassion, but he could not make out the words. He had to know what she was saying. His ears filled with a rushing sound, as if the city above him was crashing down around his shoulders and he struggled desperately to hear her.

  Images slashed a
cross his vision - hallucinations - but as real to him as the dirt he lay on. A grave on a hill, his own bloody hand, and a pile of bones. A legacy he’d left behind, the monster he’d become. The bestial part of him that had ruled for so long laughed gleefully at the gruesome images as they sped past.

  He dug his hands into the soil in rejection of all that he had become: The Sower, a night terror, a violent and ruthless fiend that haunted the Below. Waves of guilt cascaded against his fragile psyche and he howled, twisting and convulsing in the dirt. His tears made mud of the grime that covered his face.

  He thrashed about, screaming wordlessly until a single syllable materialized, uttered again and again, “No, no, no, no...”

  Her face flashed by again, and he watched as her lips moved, she seemed