Chapter 10: Chapter 8: Revival City Part 1

The experience was unlike anything Zavier had ever experienced in his life. He found himself drifting in an empty black void. This level of weightlessness was unlike anything he knew. He tried to swim around but couldn’t get any traction. It felt like he was doing nothing except squirming around in space. There was no noise, smell, or sound. The only thing that led him to believe he existed at all was that he had existed seconds earlier. After about ten seconds of this darkness an abrupt flash of yellow light flooded the void. It was blindingly bright for his eyes that had been in utter darkness. He landed on his back on a soft surface that felt similar to a waterbed.

Zavier heard Yafu’s voice before his eyes had recovered enough to see anything, “I always thought those soft beds were pointless.” Zavier rubbed his eyes and started to get his bearings. Around him was a small room with a large door about ten feet in front of him and two other doors on his left. The mattress he was on extended vertically up the wall behind him and on the sides of the wall for about five feet. It was an open mattress cube missing the top and front sides. This was because in front of him was his path way to the door and on top of him was a metal circular brace that had a swirling ring not dissimilar to the ones he had seen Shen and Arigo create. It was clear he had fallen out of this one and crashed into the mattress. Yafu and Anenna were standing on opposite ends of the mattress staring at Zavier. Yafu was cracking up and Anenna was unsuccessfully fighting a smile. It was clear there was a trick that he did not know to avoid just crashing into the floor on these journeys.

Yafu extended his hand to Zavier which he accepted. Pulling him up, they walked over to Anenna. She handed them both robes similar to the ones Zavier had seen Yafu wearing when he first showed up to his house. Anenna then walked into one of the side rooms presumably to change. Yafu gestured for Zavier to take the other one. He did and changed in the room. Walking out he saw Yafu looking very comfortable now that he was back in the robes of his world instead of the jeans of Earth. The far door and the door to the room Anenna had changed in were both opened. Yafu gave Zavier a quick smile, clearly amused to see him in these robes and then they turned together and followed Anenna outside. 

The scene was breathtaking. They stood on an open air balcony about three fourths of the way up a black marble skyscraper. The skyscraper was built on an enormous rod of rock protruding out of an ocean below them with a flat plateau at the top. The equivalent of about twenty city blocks of buildings, most made of the same black marble material, shared this elevated perch with the skyscraper they were on. There were at least twenty or thirty more of these rod-like formations all extending about a mile or so in every direction above the crashing water. Typically about a quarter mile of open air gapped each outcropping. Each of them varied a little in height and size and had different amounts of urban sprawl dotting them. On three sides of this cluster of mini-metropolises was the ocean stretching out far over the horizon. On the fourth side, to Zavier’s left as he had walked out, was a mountain range about a couple hundred feet from the furthest rock rod in that particular direction. Despite Revival City being so high above sea level, these mountains towered over even the tallest of the city's skyscrapers, blocking any sort of view of what lay beyond them. 

As Zavier continued to look around more, the organization and infrastructure of the city began to take shape. The building they were on was centrally located on their stalagmite and was the tallest one in the cluster. As far as he could tell, most clusters had this same layout with a towering central building surrounded by shorter towers and eventually single story buildings along the edges. There were floating platforms that moved in a straight line from one central tower to another one in a uniform pattern. It was similar to urban traffic, just way more air and magic based. The weather was very humid despite the thin air. It was quite warm as well except when the wind whipped through in weird and inconsistent intervals. In Earth terms the climate was a seemingly impossible combination of being up in the mountains and in the tropics by the beach at the same time.

Yafu had let Zavier take his time taking in the view. Once he had taken his second full view, Yafu waved him over to the platform connected adjacently to their balcony. At the center of the balcony was a square table coming out of the ground. The square table had a ten by ten board of square slots that looked like a checkers table. Small tiles filled these slots. They were a dark color on one side and a distinctively lighter color on the other side. Anenna was carefully flipping some of the tiles to change the layout of dark and light colors on the board. Once she had selected the pattern she wanted, Zavier felt moving parts underneath the surface of the platform begin to shift like turning gears. Once this process had reached its conclusion, the tiles on the board glowed briefly. Anenna looked at Yafu, “We need you for this part, obviously.”

Yafu stretched his arms back, still a little slowly due to his healing injuries. As he brought them forward, he unleashed a bright yellow discharge of energy at the square table. The table seemed to absorb it without taking damage and glowed yellow in turn. The platform began to slowly move, clearly following a preset course. As they cleared the airspace of the cluster they had been on, the platform picked up pace and was now flying through the air to another, larger cluster in the direction of the mountains.

“So can people like, fly here?” Zavier asked, his mind imagining the implications for himself as he saw more and more uses of soul energy.

Yafu smirked and replied, “Kind of. People have levitated themselves before as a cool trick but it’s kind of impractical.”

“How so?” Zavier said still fixated on the possibility.

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“The energy required is very high. Even high level users have to strain to keep themselves afloat a few feet off the ground. And you can’t really move around very fast or far and you can’t really do much else, you're so taxed by the effort.” Yafu replied

“Then how does this thing work? It seems a lot heavier than a person.” Zavier set indicating to the giant platform floating its way across the chasm.

“It’s made of special material that can absorb and hold energy. Every morning, the city has people who come in to charge it up. Yafu just needed to spark it so it ran the suspended spell to get us to our destination.” Anenna responded by taking the lead from Yafu for Zavier’s questions.

“That stuff, nightrock,” Yafu interjected, enthusiastically seizing the role of explainer back from Anenna, “was originally used as long burning lights at night as it slowly released the soul energy it was hit with at sundown. With a little manipulation, it can be used to build a great city or set some nasty traps. It all depends on what you're trying to do. The bits are also money! You know, since the material has value in almost any endeavor.” Zavier nodded after this and turned to stare out into the city. There was so much he needed to learn. So many different little things here that would mundane to the residents but literally otherworldly to him. He turned back and looked at Yafu. Clearly Yafu was going to enjoy showing him all he could handle. It would be the reverse of the whole car situation back on Earth.

The platform finally came to halt at the central tower of another mega stalagmite. This was clearly the main hub of the city. It had to have a sky-facing surface area at least five or six times the original rock they were on. This central tower not only towered above the sprawl it shared the rock with, but over the entire city. Zavier finally got a good look over this fractured metropolis. In addition to this, he also now could make out a huge carving of a human face on the upper cliff of the mountains in the background. It was too far away to make out any of the finer details but it was clearly a middle aged man. In Zaiver estimation, it was clearly angled in a way that was meant to “watch over” the city.

“Aye, it’s the guardian carving.” Yafu said after noticing it had caught Zaiver’s eye. “It was carved in the city's first hundred cycles. It’s supposed to be the Immortal King smiling over what we’ve built for him when he returns.”

“You mean the guy who disappeared on Earth?” Zavier asked

“Will you shut up! You can’t talk about that in public! At all!” Anenna scolded in a harsh whisper. The conversation ended there. Zavier would have to pick Yafu’s brain more about the world but it might have to wait until they were no in Anenna’s company.

As they got off they walked along a circular pathway that spiraled up and down the exterior of the building to a platform on a lower floor. Yafu once again blasted the central square of this platform with yellow. Anenna did not put any special instruction in beforehand this time. The reasoning for this became apparent once the platform started moving. It was going straight down to the base of the tower. Clearly this one was designed to only go up and down like an earth elevator. Once they got to the bottom, the street level looked almost like a normal American city except with no cars. A massive amount of people were bustling from place to place along broad gridded streets and up and down platforms that accomplished similar elevator-esque functions on smaller buildings. If every rock had a population this dense, there had to be more people here than in any city on Earth.

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