The Escalatine & The Cenoform
Their bodies were never found. But their discovery, to this day, continues to haunt the historians and engineers of our city, and they live on in our people’s memories, if not in our harrowings:
“When the Escalatine rose, there seemed to have been nothing as beautiful or monumental in the history of Apparatus. The massive lift hollow was an ovoid monolith suspended above a crowded collective of hundreds, their shared breath held. Up, the city lights were mute and streaked reflections in the dull sheen of the lightweight, pliable metal making up the bulk of the Escalatine. The carriage where the two pilots hid was barely visible, an angular structure clinging to the bottom of what seemed like a sentient, metal creature, some kind of titanic Skleros waiting, looming over the gathered. Standing on a balcony on the upper levels of the Arcane Tower, chilled by the unfamiliar rush of the high air, a gut-wrenching, bleak sense of palpable dread grew in me, and I found myself wishing that this was all a harrowing, that I would wake up and shake off the encroaching terror.”
The Enforcement engineers continue, pointlessly, to speculate as to specifically what went wrong, the cause, but everyone present saw with their own eyes the monstrous downfall of the Escalatine.
“…from my vantage, the chaos below was a swarming of feeling bodies, but, when i first managed to tear my eyes away from the unbearable spectacle above, i saw below that a majority of the onlookers present were simply awestruck in dumbfounded terror. We all witnessed it; the seeming coagulation of darkness, a sense of what was once empty space being filled with a malevolence, and the malpsyche that violated our minds.”
There is no doubt that the Cenoform was the largest recorded Skleros in the history of Apparatus. As a threat to the population, it was negligible; it had no apparent appendages or weapons. It didn’t need any.
“Those who had never seen a Skleros before were rendered completely paralyzed. It was serpentine, a massive coil that never ended, simply wound upon itself hundreds of times, its myriad length unfathomable and the weave and warp of the thing’s movement was irresistible to behold and damaging to the sanity of all present. I couldn’t look away, even as it began to enfold the Escalatine…”
No one in the city of Apparatus has ever attempted to penetrate the hollow void above our dwelling ever again. Flight is not to be our domain, not here in Apparatus.
Leave a Reply