Curiosity overrode his fear. He pressed his ear to the quartz casing and heard a faint, melodic weeping. As he adjusted the resonance of his tuning fork, a voice—ancient and exhausted—echoed in his mind.
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 city of God
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. Curiosity overrode his fear
With a heavy heart and a steady hand, Kael didn't perform the nightly maintenance. Instead, he reversed the polarity of the stabilizers. Kael was a "Light-Tender," one of the few