The Lost City

by Arctic Inferno

1- Returning Home

Once the lever had been pulled, it took only a matter of seconds for the entranceway to jump into life.

The great bronze doors opened ever so slowly with an almighty rumble and three small geysers of steam rocketed from a pipe above as if awakened by air that had not been within the crypt for centuries. A mare with the purest white fur entered, her long black coat trailing along the ground slightly as she walked, fiddling a little with her well-kept darker blue mane that came down her head on one side and curling off before reaching her ear on the other. The floor echoed her cautious hoofsteps and the bronze plating it consisted of had the occasional pipe running along or down into it, and the further she got from the door the darker her surroundings seemed to get.

At the intersection between the ground and the walls were a number of large pipes that had glass slits, allowing her to see inside. At a glance they appeared to be filled with water, but it was stagnant, musty and dark brown in colour with flecks of paint and countless dead insects floating around inside. Each of these pipes looked like they had once transported clean water and each ran out of the wall and then back into it after no more than a few yards, the huge half-glass pipes disappearing once again back behind the dusty bronze plating walls.

The walls were also bronze plating but with pillars running from the floor to the ceiling on either side. Each of the pillars had a curved grate embedded into it, showing that each was in fact hollow. The ceiling was not a flat surface at all, with several differently-sized pipes lacing the space high above the mare's head, with valves dotted at entirely random intervals. A long way from the great doors now, she sucked in a nervous breath of air and walked on forward into the complete darkness that now lay ahead.

It seemed like a lot more time walking than it actually was but she at last came to a stop. The white mare felt the wall in front of her with her front hooves. This wall seemed to have another door on it and, though not as large as the looming entrance, was still more than tall enough for her to get through. The only problem, however, was that it was locked tight with no visible keyhole. She fumbled around on the wall for a bit more before eventually one of her hooves rested onto a brass lever, jutting out from the wall close by. With a slight straining sound she forced it down and it clacked into position.

A few of the valves on the ceiling ahead gushed out concentrated geysers of steam which caused her to start. She felt the floor beneath her hooves rumble once more, only more violently this time, as if pulling that lever had awoken a sleeping dragon in the halls below. In sequence, from her location all the way down to the great doors she entered through, the pillars on either side shone with a strong light from the grating. The dark hall illuminated and she could quickly see just how far she had walked from the entrance to this new door and all the strange things that she had missed on the way; a bronze table and chair built into the floor on the right.

The white mare approached the book that lay open on the table and flicked through it, even though she only spoke a few simple parts of the language it was written in. Each new letter was a complicated arrangement of dots and straight lines and she had very little knowledge on any of them, save for two or three she had learnt whilst searching the library for history books. There was one thing the mare knew, however, and that was that the book on the table was filled with lists and lists of names, leading her to expect that the room she was in had been used as some kind of entrance hallway to something.

The thought passed through her mind as she picked the book up off the table, dusted it off and gently slid it into one of her numerous coat pockets. That was quickly interrupted, however, as a number of geysers behind her spewed out steam and the newer door she had found began to creak open. The mare tapped one of the six golden buttons on the front of her coat as she got her breathing back to normal from the sudden jump, then slowly trotted through.

What lay beyond was simply too incredible to conceive.

The doorway she had entered through led down a short flight of steps to a huge bronze plated bridge that stretched out from its starting point at the bottom of the steps to an enormous island built up in the centre of the huge, seemingly bottomless pit that this incredible place led down into without the bridge. Atop the mechanical island was an incredible number of houses in rings, some as small as cottages and others more like mansions, all surrounding and facing the centremost structure.

The building they stood around was an intricate and peculiar shape— like if somepony took a cone, turned it upside-down and jammed shards of metal into it from multiple angles— and led from the floor of the artificial island to the very ceiling of this massive room. The ceiling, the mare noted as she looked up, was miles and miles above, curving into the walls and surrounding the island's pit from at least an acre away in all directions. The walls and ceiling were entirely bronze and brass, but if she strained her eyes well enough she could see tiny hatches on their surface.

A number of bronze grates lined each side of the bridge and the city had streetlamps like any normal one built by ponies, but there was no railing at all on either side, leading the mare to shrink down and walk slowly to calm her own nerves as she walked it. A few times she forced herself to stand and look up for a moment, and the closer she got the more she realised that the 'shrapnel' in the great cone building's sides were in fact balconies. From the bottom of the island was a number of waterfalls that flowed out from the core and into the inky blackness of infinity below, and a river of the same dirty water ran through the city, calling the need for bridges at multiple points.

A mass of brass and steam machinery worked beneath the bridge, on the walls and the ceiling. Repeatedly a distant hissing sound would reach her ears from far below or above, and the island she now stood upon shook very lightly as the city's core sprung back into life beneath her hooves. Staring up at the huge centrepiece building, she suddenly spoke aloud to herself.

"... I'm home."

Author's Note:

Allow me to start by saying that this is really an attempt at writing steampunk. If you do not believe it's good enough and tell me exactly why I will be more than happy to take it down.

Let me also say that I always have the same issue with writing stories; I write out something over half an hour, read it and spellcheck and everything- often even add entire paragraphs of things that I missed the first time- but the finished result always turns out to be ridiculously short. So, I'm sorry about that. I guess until I can figure out what my issue is here then I won't really be good at writing stories at all, but I can at least say I gave it a shot.

Oh, and I wish you a happy Halloween.

Comments

[LoneUnicornWriter]

Not a bad try I must say. To say the least, I'm interested in seeing more. You're gonna need an editor and a prereader for future chapters so that it doesn't fall into bad waters. One group I could suggest to you is "Looking For Editors".

But I honestly think it was a pretty good try and has potential of actually going somewhere. :)

[Hunter96]

I like it very firm writing not a lot of grammatical mistakes. Could use more detail and a little less repitition of some word descriptions.