There’d not been much to do in the small town at the base of the massive metal pillar. The place was little more than an oversized waystation, its main utility being to carry people up into the tower and down. Everything else was centered around this labor, from robot repairs to buying and selling carts and parts and pieces.
Damon was not having a grand time. His forehead was throbbing, like he’d just tried opening a hole in a wall with his head.
“Another one?”
“Just how many languages have you learned?”
“I don’t know.” He muttered, rubbing his temples. “The system just keeps installing new ones.”
“Oh! This sounds like that dialect near the Sandy Coasts!” Han laughed, patting Damon’s back. “Worry not, I am certain the Goddess will know how to patch your axon.”
“That’s certainly one thing to look forward to.”
They stood at the “station”, a large flat area with landing-zones marked out as red squares on the floor. There were at least a hundred other people milling about and waiting for their own rides.
“Roses is here.” Sybil pointed at one of the flying robots that was rapidly approaching.
“You shouldn’t worry too much. If we fall, Sybil and I have puffer seeds.” Han patted Idina’s shoulder. The green-skinned woman was several shades paler than an hour ago.
Damon caught the mischievous glint in Sybil’s eye. “Is that normal?”
“If it happens, you’ll know since the puffer seeds are very loud.” Sybil proclaimed.
“There are taverns in Sky Bridge with drinking games.”
Han’s enthusiastic comment gained several squints, but their focus had turned back to ‘Roses’. The robot was little more than a large flat piece of metal with a bunch of rotors attached on top. And hanging underneath was a slightly smaller basket. Damon eyeballed it to being barely able to handle six people comfortably.
“We had to ask for a bigger robot, since Damon has to count for two.” Sybil proclaimed, watching the basket touch on the landing area while the robot remained hovering, its blades whirling and creating a powerful downdraft of wind. “Hop on!” She had to raise her voice to compensate for the noise.
Idina clenched Damon’s arm with clammy fingers. He could only laugh and hold on to one of the ropes tying the basket to the robot. The moment they took off, the sasin gave a small shriek and Han burst into laughter while Sybil looked on in amusement. They rose into the air, where the number of flying robots swelled.
Looking on to their destination, Damon was reminded of a beehive entrance, with the bees flying in and out. Except this time, the bees were the size of buses and cars, and each one was using propellers to hold themselves aloft. Over-sized drones by all accounts. Idly, he wondered what’d happen if someone fell and landed on one such propeller, but a quick check confirmed there was an order to the madness.
Not one robot flew above another, sometimes even swerving and changing direction just so the robot, a couple dozen meters above or below, would not be directly vertically aligned.
And the closer they moved to the void-black tower, the more Damon began to feel a sense of awe at the sheer scale of it. Their destination, a ‘hole’ on its side, had been barely large enough he could’ve covered it with his thumb when looking at it from the ground, but as they got closer, he realized it had been yet another trick of the perspective.
They could’ve built the town within the station itself if they’d wanted, and there would’ve still been room to spare for three more. Instead, it was currently occupied by thousands of people, cottages, some small houses, and mountains of what could only be cargo. LOTS of cargo. Damon spotted at least two robots that were moving things around, and each was the size of a whole house.
There was a creeping feeling within him.
“Just how large are the… cable cars?”
Han and Sybil shared a mirthful look, chuckling. All they had to do was to point off into the distance, into the large gaping hole through which the four monumental cables that punctured into the flat wall at the back. Each one was at least four stories tall. Damon could only stare as he tried to comprehend what had gone into making this, let alone the materials or effort.
And in the direction Han and Sybil had been pointed at was a gigantic box.
A box hanging from the two lower cables. It was not made of glass, it couldn’t, but it certainly looked the part. A gigantic glass box with more of that void-black material as the roof and floor. The entire box was criss-crossed with metal struts, but Damon’s eyes kept trying to find where or how the thing was moving in their direction.
“That is transport box one.” Sybil said. “The ride to Sky-Bridge will take roughly a week.”
“It supposedly moved faster in the older days.” Han nodded along.
“Even if it were half as fast, it would still be better than having to walk there.” The vulpes shuddered with the proclamation.
Damon raised an eyebrow at that. “Story time?”
“I had to walk, once.” Was all the answer she gave.
Glancing at his side, Idina stood stock still, eyes wide, mouth slightly agape. Her hands kept opening and closing as she could only keep staring at the approaching box that could have fit the entirety of her village twenty times over and still have room to spare. It was as if someone had looked upon the biggest container ships back on Earth and, in a fit of madness, decided that it just wasn’t enough, that they needed to make something several times that size. And then hang it from cables the thickness of a building.
It was hard not to feel entirely speechless at the sight of it.
The trip in the ‘cable-car’ had been a mostly sleepless one. Even with the ride being smooth and silent, day and night, Damon and Idina just stuck around, taking in everything. The mountains were colored, somehow, yellow, red, and blue, with certain points of greens, purples, and oranges. Snow capped near every peak, hills and valleys stretching all around underneath.
From the altitude they hung, it was hard to spot, but Damon could also make out monsters all over the place. Wandering the forests, sometimes fighting one another, sometimes just chasing and rushing about as if with a destination in mind.
The other people within the cable-car gave Damon a very wide berth, which he did not mind at all, as just sitting there and watching everything around them was taking up just about every bit of his attention. It was like he was fighting to regain his capability to just breathe. And when night fell?
The damn black roof became transparent.
The stars hung over them like the universe was their personal chandelier. The moon, stars, and nebulas hang over their heads in a near psychedelic display of colors and light.
Somehow, by the time they were reaching the end of the trip, Damon had felt like it had been too brief.
“Come on over.” Sybil had insisted on the night before they’d arrived. “You need to see this.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, I am sure.” She declared, grabbing his hand and pulling him over, Idina following closely as they moved to the front of the box.
In the relative darkness of the not-glass box, the starlight from above still proved enough to not trip between the boxes or people. The general surprise the others showed around Damon was mostly gone, and he was mostly sure it was because Sybil was announcing their approach.
And when they finally reached the front, Damon had to stop and attempt to make sense of what he was looking at.
The sky and its shining rainbow glitter reached all the way to the dark, jagged horizon the mountains created. And though the snow was clearly visible under the dim illumination from above, reflecting the light in a pale blue sheen, there was something obscuring that. A structure that had lights of its own and seemed to be floating between the mountains.
Damon frowned, leaning forward.
Realization was slow to dawn on him.
Quietly, his eyes just kept broadening further and further.
It was a bridge.
A dark bridge that connected two of the largest mountains, a massive flat plane with thousands of lights shimmering on top. Underneath the plane was an empty void that led directly towards mountains underneath. It was a bridge the size of a city that actually had a city on it.
So far off the ground, there were snow-capped mountains underneath.
It was a city suspended by only God knew what feats of engineering.
“Welcome to Sky-Bridge city.”
Sybil whispered in his ear, clearly enjoying his stunned look of awe.
“How?”
It was a singular question of disbelief, the entire focus of his being. How? How was this possible at all?
“The Gods made it.” She answered, smug. “One of their many miracles, the proof of their incredible power.”
Damon could only slump to the ground and stare mutely.
How could he answer such a claim? That this could only be the product of technology that was worlds ahead, even the world he’d lived in?
It was hard to fathom the sheer scale of it all.
Damon had remained seated quietly, even as the suns slowly rose over the horizon while they kept approaching. The large darkened slab of suspended civilization slowly became clearer. Its size was even larger than he’d suspected, the lights that had been scattered around its surface only covering the central parts of the structure. Giant green archways held the entire flat plane aloft, the sparkling metal burrowing into the mountains to what must have been impossible depths.
Steam rose from all over the city, even the parts where there didn’t seem to be any activity. From this far out, the place was clearly partially abandoned. Yet it was just so large that the parts that were being in use should have housed millions of people.
The cable-car’s angle of approach was a poor one, but Damon was sure he could even spot farmland or something that looked very close to it.
And in the center of it all was the tower.
A tower of glass and steel in the form of a spiral, its colors reflecting the mountains all around it, shining under the early morning rays.
“That is the Thalaring temple and the royal palace.”
Damon nearly jumped. Had Sybil been there all this time? He awkwardly nodded and swallowed, glancing back at the city they were slowly approaching.
“Why is it so empty?”
“See the steam? Those are points of conduit, the main source of water and heat for the city. Most of them had not been working for… a long time. Living anywhere too far from the temple was very tough back at the time. But the king managed to get the archways working again. The population has been steadily growing since. When I first showed up, there were just two of them, one being the Thalaring temple itself, but in the years since, more of it was fixed.”
Damon nodded slowly at the sight of it, trying to drink in as much as he could. One question did emerge, however.
“Fix how?”
“They’ve managed to figure out that there are ways to repair some of the God’s work using monster parts. Though I’m not sure exactly how that works.” She chuckled. “It’s thanks to that, users have started having a surge again, what with the kingdom paying good coin for anyone willing to hunt for parts and seeds.”
As she spoke, Damon couldn’t help but frown slightly at the sight of the massive city. A place built way before either of their times, with resources no one could ever be able to dream of, let alone achieve. Yet capable of being repaired through the parts harvested from monsters?
The Nameless God had made the monsters intentionally this way, or so the myth had told.
Damon started to wonder about that.
