GLoGtober 23: In the Lurch
Image: Artist unknown, The "Flammarion Engraving," 1888. Public domain source.
GLoGtober Challenge #1: Atlantis-type situation but in reverse. It goes up instead of down.
The fate of the city of Lurch hangs by a single thread.
The thread rises from the city center. Gold and taught as a bowstring, it coils upwards into the sky until it reaches the vault of the heavens, where it disappears into a slit cut in the opalescent stone dome. Aviators who have pressed their ear against the sky's blue glass claim to have heard a dissonant wailing - perhaps the celestial winds or perhaps some cosmic horror.
Each week, the city of Lurch is hoisted exactly 1 foot closer to the sky dome. The motion is sudden and jarring. Visitors are thrown from their feet while locals hold onto the frequent handrails and pull ropes sprinkled around the city. Lurch Day is celebrated as a city wide holiday, a day of forgiveness and happy accidents. Incomplete work and minor trespasses are, fittingly, said to be "left in the Lurch."
Citizens of Lurch count the golden thread and their gradual upward movement as a great blessing. The ground below has long been apocalyptically flooded, with only the occasional jagged peak poking above the waves to suggest that there was ever land below at all. Aircraft sent to forage for supplies have uncovered all manner of ruined towns, castles, and churches preserved just below the water's surface, as if frozen in amber. Folk traditions say that a kindly angel took pity on the people of Lurch and let down a single thread of her hair to carry them to safety.
City officials take a somewhat more dour view of the matter. Each week the ceiling draws nearer and contemporary estimates suggest that a collision is imminent, perhaps as close as a year off. Additionally, the thread itself is looped and braided through a series of metal pulleys and hooks in the sub layers of the city. Enterprising adventurers could slide down it deep into Lurch's underbelly. It's a stable apparatus but requires constant maintenance lest the next Lurch Day send the whole city careening into the sea below.
The undercity of Lurch is like the root ball of an old tree - a dense nest of copper pipes and maintenance tunnels shot through with a zigzag of gold. Some tunnels predate the city's suspension, others are new access corridors added by the Threadminders. What little natural soil clings to the city is tangled in between, sometimes dropping away in great clods on Lurch Day. Dire gulls and zeppelin fish make their nest among the dangling structures, alongside outcasts, criminals and sky pirates.
More troubling still are rumors that have filtered to Lurch through aircraft merchants travelling to the floating cities of the Boatfolk - a bounty has been put out for a length of the golden thread. It's hyper strong, obviously magical, and impossibly delicate but the questions remain: who would ask for such a thing and what could be worth the cost?