Revolution

*Posted by : Winteroak on Mar 6, 2018, 12:46am*

Dusk - 18th August - The Steamworks - Late evening

Enoch Solomon walked over the South Bridge near Fog Bend as the always dim light of the day changed into darkness. Another day under the maelstrom. Another day in this fetid, bleak city they called home. The Last Bastion of Mankind.
His shift had finished, not long ago, at the Cobalt Sextant, one of the largest metalwork factories in Dusk. He had joined its ranks a few weeks ago. It was not hard to secure menial labour at the workhouses.

Rodbusters were in high demand. Everyday someone died at the great iron mongering institutions. Every day someone got fired for simply displeasing a foreman. Most factory owners put profits above the health and safety of their workers.
Even children and young women were employed in terrible conditions in textile mills and flagslag refineries.
Furnaces were operated without proper safety checks. Workers in factories and mills were deafened by steam hammers and machinery. The hours were long and the daily grind soon took its tool on you. Still people had to eat. Eat whatever scraps the The City in the Sky deemed they could feast on.

He had joined the Cobalt Sextant to spread the word and tenets of the Red Crew. He needed to do so in secret, as most unions were outlawed and the ones that existed were simply puppets to the First Families and the Council. They did not care about the people of Dusk.

Dusk was relentlessly squalid city, a nightmarish place, with a brutal government and a grim industrial environment.
It is was vast pollutant, a stench. Fat chimneys retched dirt into the sky, a city that never truly slept.
Faint shouts, here and there, the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rutted.
The atmosphere of violence and corruption that followed you never relented; torture, madness, and death pervade the city, dark and foreboding.

Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite ever feeding the Maelstrom. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with Flagesium dust, burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped Dusk in a stench that suffocated like guilt.

Dusk was full of alienated individuals, social groups, and social strata. People like Enoch lived on the margins of society, either by choice, or social pressure, or both. Identities were fluid, allegiances shift suddenly, the need to feed your loved one more night, a weight only the masses know of.
Betrayal was commonplace, and trust was at a premium. Making existence in this already hazardous society even more precarious. Thus why no one knew his last name. No one knew he was a Fordham. Younger brother to the Butcher of Orphans.

To his mind and since an early age Dusk displayed an intriguing thematic dualism, between social structures, between the City itself, the Delve below and Elesium above.
Awareness and reality intertwined at every junction of your daily live.
That always struck him as the crux of the situation they found themselves in.
Why would those with power ever release it unless they were forced to?

Revolution. That was what Dusk needed. And the secret to a successful revolution, in his mind, lay in The Steamworks.