Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
At first he didn’t think anything of it.
Back in the 19th century, in his hometown of Londbridge, Pool would often see vagrants and destitute sleeping rough on the streets, pan-handling, lurking in the shadows, cast off from society. It was some commonplace and ubiquitous that other than the brief interactions with them whether during an inquiry or by happenstance interaction—they weren’t likely to beg a coin from a constable—they faided into the background like stray cats and dogs.
The Empire of that period was rigidly stratisfied, at least when looking upward; there was little impediment from a honest working man falling to a lower class, but the highest of peaks when trying to rise from the streets.
At the very bottom, below the lowest rung of the ladder were the worms of the mud, squirming hungrily between the ladder’s feet, almost unaware of even the infested flophouses of the first rung, then tenements on the one above that, never realizing that for each rung, there was another above it. Even the merchants in their swept neighborhoods of marble and bronze and yards with iron fences and gates, could scarcely see more than a rung or two above and never into the impeneratrable clouds where the swaddled and coddled aristocrats licked the boots of the Emperor himself.
So it came as a shock to him when Constable Pool realized, perhaps inspired from his stop in the Sind on the way to Singhapol, that amidst the vast wealth of this new world order, there were even more poor than there were in his time.
Looking out over the hazy cityscape he could see them everywhere, broken bodies in rags wearing cast off masks begging scraps of food from passersby, all set against a backdrop of 500 meter tall palaces of gleaming glass and steel. They lay sweltering under tarps and propped bits of metal, scoured by acid rain which here fell every afternoon at teatime like forgotten clockwork.
He found that if he looked straight up (dislodging some sweat under the hood of his…Nila’s raincoat) he could make out the barest hint of a blue sky. At forty-five degrees the orange smog became dominant before descending toward the burnt umber horizon.
It could have been a trick of the light, a mirage in the noxious mist, or it could have been a passing airship, but he thought he saw a glimmer of some distant city high above in the sunlight and fresh upper airs.
Ion Fyr 