Excerpt: Tirwall (title subject to change)

We all knew that the waterfall was significant; we had been taught that it was sacred since we were toddlers. But no one really knew why. I suppose they all wondered why at one point in time, but they gave up on finding out the waterfall’s secrets long ago. Everyone except my grandmother and my father of course. But she was an “eccentric” so they dismissed her theories and schemes, and my father was dead. I guess they worried about me becoming an eccentric too, because they ended up putting me in the most dour, unimaginative place in the world.
Tirwall is called the Grey City for a reason. Everything is made of steel. The homes, the roads, the walls, the ground…it’s all made of metal. The city itself was built in a crater countless years ago by a now extinct race of highly intelligent beings known as the Creators, or so I was taught. Anyway, Tirwall used to be a grand city where advanced technology was produced and shipped all over the world. The most important things that were made were weapons, and not just any weapons, but human weapons. Immortal soldiers who would never die, who ran on power from some sort of stone called Lifestone. These soldiers were sold to whichever country could afford them, whether they had good intentions or not. As it turned out, their intentions were not so good. They used the soldiers to conduct a worldwide war, during which Tirwall was destroyed. Tirwall was the only place you could get Lifestone, so it was destroyed in order to stop the engineers from making more soldiers to sell to the enemy.
When the war ended, any immortal soldiers that could be found were destroyed; their Lifestone was taken and sealed away in a vault in a high-security military facility. Tirwall was rebuilt. A new city was built over the old one so that there are two levels to the city. There’s the Lower City, where half the buildings are deserted, burned and demolished. No one bothered to rebuild them, not even the people who still live in the Lower City, not-so-affectionately called Gnomes. It’s always dark and damp in the Lower City. Then there’s the Upper City, where big-wig companies, upper class workers and the military live. They’re called Sylphs. It’s much nicer in the Upper City. They have well-kept buildings, an elaborate rail system, and they have the waterfall. People who live in the Upper City almost never come below, unless they’re military. The military is in the Lower City a lot, trying to keep tabs on the “riff-raff.”
I spend my days in both worlds. I told you I live in the most dour, unimaginative place in the world, but really I live in two dour, unimaginative places. Everyone in the Lower City, even children, either has a job and hates it or does not have a job and does not care. I am one of those with an unfortunate job, though most everyone in the Lower City would kill for it. I deliver packages to people in the Upper City. Delivering the packages is not the problem, but the people I regularly deal with are a pain. Going through security between the Lower and Upper Cities is bad enough. The only good things about my job are getting to see some of the places in the Upper City and getting away from the darkness and hopelessness of the Lower City.
Two of my favorite places in Tirwall are the Academy and the river. The Academy is a school in the Upper City where talented people go to study so they can get important jobs, like engineers, doctors, airship pilots and military officers. I know a young man, a Gnome, who works at the Academy. He’s not a teacher, but a maintenance worker. His name is Cyrus, and he’s amazingly talented in navigation and engineering. His dream is to become a professional navigator, but since he has no money, he cannot afford to go to the Academy. So he got a job fixing things there, and gets to eavesdrop on classes for free. He tells me anything and everything he learns when I see him on my days off from delivery work. The other place I like to visit is the river. It comes from the Waterfall in the sky and flows out of Tirwall and into the moors and wastelands beyond. For some reason I’ve always been attracted to the river, whether for its mystery or something else, I don’t know. But my goal is to find its spring. My father tried to find it once; he saved money all his life and bought an airship and modified it. The airships they make now can’t fly very high, not high enough to reach the top of the waterfall, but my father figured out how to make them go even higher. He went to the Academy and studied aeronautics. One night he made a breakthrough in his research, and brought his theory before the head of the Academy. They thought he was crazy, but he was right. So he modified an airship, set sail when I was five years old, and never came back. He left me in the care of my grandmother, and we waited for him to come back for three years. That’s when a neighbor had me put in the care of an orphanage because she thought my grandmother was crazy. I know she gets lonely without me, so I visit her whenever I can. She lives in the Lower City, where my mother was from. My father was from the Upper City, from a wealthy family, but he wasn’t on good terms with them, so I never see them. I never even met them.