Iron Spires

The Iron Spires are sky-high lumps of metal and glass, warped beyond recognition. Under the scorching rays of the sun, light refracts between the spires and intensifies, turning them into shining death traps. Metal beams pool at the base. Even in the dead of night, heat pulses and wafts through the structures.
As sunscrapers they were home to millions. Now they are only visited by nomadic scavengers in search of valuable loot. Those who have ventured deep into the bowels of the Spires describe walls that are body-warm to boiling, their steps echoing alongside the creaks and groans of a still collapsing ruin, and perhaps most disturbing: the gurgling of trapped water boiling and condensing.
Defying Nature
The Iron Spires stand as a monument to hubris. Dubbed the sunscrapers in their heyday, they stretched all the way from the bedrock up past the clouds. The sunscrapers would not have been possible without atmodomes. The cutting edge atmospheric and terraforming technology was integrated into the very walls of the towers. With it, housing could provide personalized biospheres tailored to each resident.The sunscrapers were not just a symbol of prosperity, but of the united solar system. The technology was made as an interplanetary collaboration, the materials were imported, and the finest plants from all across the sol system decorated the botanical gardens and greenspaces of the sunscrapers.
With the atmodomes as symbols of human defiance, of life in inhospitable terrain, people clung to the belief that the sunscrapers were near invincible. Even after the fall of Hun Kal, the Triumvirate told refugees to seek shelter in the sunscrapers. As the atmodomes and sunscrapers fell, one after another, the Triumvirate were forced to face reality. By the time Hokusai was obliterated, a planet-wide evacuation was well underway.
Nomads of Mercury
Sunbleached Wastelands
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The imagery is very evocative with all the spooky sounds and weird electrical phenomenon. I love the additions about people delving into the Spires. A very high risk, high reward job, I suppose!
Thank you so much!
Solaris -— a sapphic space opera
Creator of World of Worlds | Camp Chill | Comment Carolers