The City of Halidom

After the Great Weathering stripped the land and broke the old world, the survivors fled to what remained. They found shelter in the ruins of an ancient seabed, where the ground was barren, and the Bloom had not yet taken hold.

So they built upward.

They raised ten towers from limestone, clay, steel, and salvaged faith, hauling bricks by hand, shaping glass to catch the sun, and stringing scaffold lines between stone and sky until the city could hold itself above the damage below.

The city was never meant to sprawl. It was built close enough for a climber to cross its heights by rope and rigging, for voices to carry, and for every tower to depend on the next.

Above the city, they hung the Cloudline. Suspended from the Central Spire like spokes on a wheel, it gathered light and returned it as rain. The minerals carried in the mist softened the scarred ground and helped gardens take hold again.

For a time, Halidom was a fresh start.

As the generations passed, Halidom divided. Those who lived above the Cloudline embraced order and systems. Towers rose higher. Gardens moved indoors. The hands that once hauled bricks found other hands to do it.

The people of the upper towers came to be known as the Highborn. Below them were the Rooted, people who still worked the ropes and kept the rain systems running.

Some stopped looking down. Others were told to stay below.

The Cloudline became a curtain between two cities sharing one structure. One preserved itself through distance. The other through labor and community.

Both depended on the same sun and the same rain, and that dependence was fixed into law.

The Grand Barter: No hand could cross the Cloudline unsanctioned.

Even so, the city's old shape didn't disappear completely. It remains in old murals, and in the songs some still keep. And the systems that still require maintenance if Halidom is to survive.