Elian — Chapter 2: The Capital
The story continues! Here’s the first chapter if you haven’t read it yet.
This chapter is still being written, what follows is just the first scene!
Accompanying music track:
The Aerthale’s sky-reaching towers and massive, city-encompassing arches painted the horizon long before Elian could set his eyes on the entrance. The rising sun was right behind the capital, bathing the already blinding white city in its warm rays, making it appear on fire.
Nineteen railroad bridges converged on the ocean-built city - spreading from it like tiny veins in the distance over the rocky terrain. One of them, however, was over water, still under construction - the first to-be transoceanic route.
“Took them long enough,” Uncle Herbert scoffed, when he heard the news about the start of the construction. “It was ready to begin thirty years ago, but they were still fighting about the budget before I left!”
The bridges only looked tiny from afar. The young man was dwarfed by the one he was running beside - connecting his home province, Ithera, with the continent’s heart.
As he was approaching the city, the ground started trembling slightly, as if giving a gentle warning. A familiar, mechanical rocking sound repeating at a precise interval was building up from behind.
Elian thought he had already got used to it, but just as suddenly as the first time, a deafening horn flooded his ears, stunning him, as a freight train thundered overhead, carrying cars upon cars of whitestone - the main export of his province - from which most of the capital was built.
The train was so absurdly long that it took over two minutes to pass. This was the sixth one he’d seen in the last three days, since joining the bridge at the edge of the golden valley.
Elian was running.
It was mid-afternoon by the time he approached the city entrance.
The sun was dimmed by sprawling airships entering and exiting the city’s numerous sky ports.
But on the ground, it was eerily empty - almost no one entered the city on foot, except for people visiting from nearby towns and villages, of which there were not many, due to the surrounding rocky terrain.
The capital quietly looked down at Elian from its hundred-meter elevation and its innumerable towers rising one above another like stalagmites built up over centuries. Its walls and arches stretched in all directions for kilometers, as far as the eye could see, enclosing him more as he was crossing the entrance bridge.
This wasn’t Elian’s first time in Aerthale - his parents took him once when he was seven. But somehow, the city felt even bigger to him now than it was back then, when he was little. He wasn’t sure whether it was just due to him being at the foot of the city instead of a sky port, the importance of the errand, or both.
He was at the gates. Two massive, thousand-year-old, forty-meter-high doors - an entire Frigate-class airship could fit through each one. Both of them had unique engravings showing the city’s ancient history - the old wars, people arriving at the shore, finding shelter in an unknown ancient machine, construction of the arches and ancient air travel. At the center, where the doors met, was the discovery of the Inversion Core - the invention that had lifted humanity into the skies. The doors were made of the same metal as military airships.
They were closed.
As Elian was studying the engravings, a deep, loud metallic click echoed from inside the doors.
He stepped back, cautious of being hit by a door weighing at least as much as several cars of that whitestone train.
A small wicket gate clicked open in the corner.
Elian chuckled.
The city didn’t open the big gates for him, but at least it still remembered him.