“Across the Shifting Expanse, you either live around the Tempest Spire, or you don’t. Outsiders, surely, think this is an obvious statement. It always seems they imagine it’s some kind of local half-joke. Of course the alternative to not living somewhere is to live somewhere else. Yet every time they finally make it out to the bare, broken, remote wilderness outside of the more developed tourist traps- they’re surprised.
“Oh, they say, there’s nothing out here! No. There’s not. You either live in the Spire, or you don’t.
“The Spire is what you expect. Dragons working for the Stormcatcher, following their own technological pursuits, or dealing in some black-market kind of fair which is neither my business nor yours for the moment. Wire, metal, magic, steam- organic and inorganic life smashed together in whatever popular corporate drama outsiders think of when they imagine Lightning’s territory.
“What they forget, though, is perhaps the most important thing; the Stormcatcher came here in the in the Second Age. Everything out here is new. Or. Relatively new.
“That’s important. It explains why, when you leave the confines of the Spire, civilization drops off suddenly. The desert itself seems to watch you, as soon as you dare leave the city. The desert is still angry. After all, the Spire spits in its face, and dictates its own rules about living out here- and the desert has never forgiven us.
“Outside the Spire, amid the naked rocks, the Lightning Farm begins. There isn’t life there. At least none that’s common to see. The air reeks of ozone, and an unease about the place claws constantly at your back. I laid wire out there for years, and that’s when I began to realize that progress can incite the wrath of a landscape itself.
“On long nights wires would go down. In storms we could lose power to half the spire, but find nothing wrong. These cables were made to protect themselves against the desert- against the sand and the wind and the vultures- but mysteriously they’d go down. Lots of the dragons I worked with blamed the beastclans, talking down about them like they weren’t here first. Still, I don’t know about any rocs or harpies that could tear those cables in two, despite the numbers of times I found them shredded in the cracked mud.
“This isn’t Earthshaker’s desert. It doesn’t have the feel of ‘old and forgotten’ or some tolerant but unforgiving place- the Expanse doesn’t want us here, and in order to stay at all we have to defy the very nature around us. Pump in water, pump in power, import food, shutter doors, lock windows, hope the sandstorm doesn’t get into any of the more delicate equipment.
“Towns outside the Spire aren’t so much towns as they’re often fortresses. Barricades against that spiteful desert. They pop up most of the time along the railroad routes.
“I mean, sure, I’ve heard of groups that live with the desert- respect it and comfort it so that it accepts them- but those clans must be more nomadic than not. That’s the only real alternative. Sometimes in the Canyon you’ll pass old mud walls- long abandoned but undisturbed by the same desert that rots and erodes everything else. As if, in exchange for the people’s devotion, the desert will keep their dwellings just as they were in case the people come back.
“The territory is rife with technology, but people often seem to forget that like lightning itself, the magic out here is raw, untamed- violent. You either live in the Spire, or you don’t. You’re either a fighter, or you’re not. Either way, there are no half-measures out here. There’s no moderation. It’s all, or nothing.”
