Sykport

Previously

I awoke with a tome on my chest, a book entitled "Sykport".

I sat upright and the book slid slightly, as though it were going to fall off. I caught it with my arm and held it to my abdomen, looking around the room. I was in a house, whose design was not entirely separate from the white-painted steel of the houses in the engine. Except that when I looked out the window I saw something entirely unfamiliar; vines creeping up by the window. I could see one of them creeping into the room through the aperture.

I felt my face and knew that the wound had healed since I had been injected. This was ordinary to me, I had never suffered long, I have since observed that I was singular in my recuperative abilities. While on the engine, I had never been seriously injured, and then been examined by a doctor. I had always kept quiet about it and the pain had gone away. But I'd never compared it to the people around me, how a broken bone took weeks for them to heal, while mine might go away overnight. My cracked tooth was good again, as well.

I looked out my window to try to see anything, but I discovered that it was snowing, and it disallowed me from seeing anywhere. I could look up and see the sky, and off in the distance what appeared to be gray shapes soaring into the clouds, but it seemed as though there were no ground. Again; a familiar sensation that the engine had always provided; the feeling that there was never anything under you, that the platforms you traversed were the planet, rather than the ground that supported your home's pillars.

It was bright enough to allow me to read, so I did. I read the opening chapter, which detailed Sykport's origins. I assumed that Sykport was a misspelling of "Skyport", but as I read it over and over again as Sykport, it dawned upon me that it was the proper spelling. I learned that it was a city that had been around for longer than anyone could remember. That for a time it was inhabited by savages that crawled from underground, who would assualt anyone in the city.

A man came along named Stafdt who lead a band of soldiers from the nearby country of Zion. He sealed the holes that let the savages out, and therein stopped the marauders from attacking. That event was apparently happened a mere seventy years ago, by the book's reckoning. Stafdt's son was still alive (also named Stafdt) and continued a vigilant watch for savages. They still turned up from previously unknown holes, but they always found the openings and closed them with debris.

Sykport was apparently built by whomever built the engine, but did not impart it a soul; it was a city without a soul, and to me this was frightening. Having lived under a massive soul for all my life, it was the same as the shock of discovering that your god had died millenia ago; I identify most with the grief stricken mortheists, as I had so much faith placed in the engine, that reading the book on Sykport crushed my religion, just as the shattered statue of god must have so destroyed theirs.

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