1 Prologue

The cliff stood witness as the tide crashed violently into the shore below.

The waves inevitably retreated, defeated, as the swell ebbed back and forth. The cliff withstood the perpetual onslaught, as it had done for centuries, indifferent to the interchanging phases of the sun and moon. The cliff had weathered storms and droughts, fires and earthquakes, without complaint. On the topside, a small band of nomads huddled by a single fire, a pinprick candle in the endless night.

Fishing villages were raised on the shore below, and a settlement slowly grew, nestled on its peak, gradually sprawling to cover the archipelago. Thrumming with life, it became a hive of activity. Spires rose over the years, upthrust statues spearing into the clouds to overlook the city and shoreline. Roads were paved and earth was churned, sectioned into fields and housing. Steps were carved into the cliff face, ropes and pulleys hammered, stitched and pegged from shoreline to peak.

The cliff stood witness as the city grew into its own, rulers raised up and cast down, generations were born, lived and died, each with individual stories intertwined like hair-thin threads of a larger tapestry. War and fire had purged the city countless times as civilisations came and went. Technology advanced, smoke and steam belched from chimneys and factories. Storms washed away the ports below and earthquakes had cracked the cities above, only for the occupants to swarm like ants to rebuild, each time more ambitious than before. The sounds of whirring, pumping and the grinding of gears mixed with the cacophony of gulls circling above. Air ships lumbered into the atmosphere from a raised skyport, steam whistling and sails flapping in the wind. Trade and travel blossomed.

The cliff stood witness as the city reached its zenith, a hub of learning, progress and prosperity. Peace reigned, but it was heedless to its hubris, a whole people blissfully unaware it was only floating in the calm of the storm's epicentre. The affluence of the city had not gone unnoticed. The ingenious inventions of steam and technology became both coveted and feared by other lands, who in turn forged an alliance of envy and hatred against the city. The combined military might of all the surrounding nations razed and pillaged its ways to the city of wonder. War unlike any other swept the continent, a single city of industrial science holding off wave after wave of its primitive opponents.

The air was filled with the smell of burning oil, seared flesh and molten metal. Screams of the wounded and dying slowly became the softer moans of those resigned to their fate. Eventually the great gear-work gates of brass and bronze were breached, the fields razed and the statues toppled. Anything that harnessed steam or wind, heat or water was cast down and broken asunder. Those who understood the intricacies of technology were hunted down and persecuted, and a new order of a simple faith was installed. Stability was restored, but the city had changed. No longer did the streets resound with the tinkering of invention, or the singing of mechanical songbirds. No more airships took flight. The genius once encouraged to blossom, was now cut down and despised.

The cliff stood witness, unmoved by the tragedy of an era.

It was just as unmoved by a small boy climbing the remaining ragged ropes and pulleys across its face.

Had it known that the boy was impertinently named Cliff in its honour, it might have thrown him from its side, to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below. But, like his namesake, Cliff would endure.

The boy was a lone surviving spark of the ruined city above. A spark which, given the right gusts of chance, could be fanned into a flame.

Had the cliff even remotely suspected that the boy would one day be responsible for a cataclysm that would desolate this entire continent and send convulsions through the very fabric of reality - then the cliff may have collapsed itself entirely, to safely snuff out the spark before the subsequent inferno consumed the world.

But it did not suspect, and so instead - it witnessed.