The Amber Spires: Part One

I found the devil in the guts of the Amber Spires, more than two decades ago now, down in the filthy rubble that made up the outer rings of shacks and hovels posted up high above the filth ways. The spires are long gone now, pulverized by the Hulcans when they pushed north, but back when I was a boy they were something special. Great big towers that shot into the heavens and cast their light into the smog clouds that enveloped the concrete apartments around them, what we would have given to step one foot through those doors. It was like looking at the gates of heaven.

You learn a lot as you grow older though, you get wiser, a little smarter if you’re lucky, most importantly you get a way of reading people, a sixth sense one could call it, you can spot a liar, or a thief, you can spot evil from a long way off. I didn’t know it at the time but the whole city was rotten like an over ripe fruit ready to collapse under its own weight, a handsome man one day, a beautiful women the next, telling us how great our proud city would be in the coming years while they sat in their homes miles above us feeding off the hope of a billion souls.

Drugs and sex are one thing, human nature most would say, I myself have never said no to a pretty girl or drag off a smelly hand rolled cigarette. No, I found real evil, debauchery I’ve only read of in the books of old, when there were still trees, and birds, and oceans. History makes good and evil appear so obvious, as if we should have known all along, as if it was right in front of us the entire time. To lose oneself in the mind grinding horrors of war is one thing, but to sit comfortably in a clean warm home and sin the way those men did is pure evil.

My name is Edward L. Maracana, second captain of the 84th riot division under the control of General Jared R. Laremy, and this is the story of how I met the devil of the Amber Spires.