The Divide

Take a continent. Cut it flat-wise, like two pieces of bread. Pull the two pieces apart, leaving a space between them one mile high and ten thousand miles wide.   That space is The Divide.   That space is where we all live. We live crowded in filth and poverty around the rare holes, where rain and sunlight fall into the sea mixed with the clouds of poison that roll down from the surface world. Or we live in the darkness and desiccation of the lands away from the sea: our only water the drops of stalactites, our only light the cold glow of the distant, unknowable sunwyrms that coil their paths across the ceiling.   Or: we delve.   There have been ages and empires before us, though there are none now left who remember them. Titans the size of cities—titans that are cities—lie heaped and skeletal in the barrens. Dead gods may rise again. Relics of these and others are one of the few paths to wealth and power for those who refuse to die in squalor or in dust; though for most, they are simply markers for a grave further from home.   But for those few who survive, that power and knowledge are the key to becoming something greater than they were born. The lever that will move mountains. The chisel with which they will carve out a new world.   A world in the space between.