Valkyrie: Building Notes for the Everburning City

The Spire, and The Bore

Skip to the last 25 seconds of the above video. Now, try to imagine it with less smoke, and a whole heck of a lot more fire.

That's the Spire.

Well, really no. I suspect some of your eyes might glaze over if I described it as an Asthenosphere Mass Ejection. Which would be a disappointment, since it sounds similar to a Coronal Mass Ejection, which is the cool part of a solar flare.

So yes, the City's founding Crafters were crazy enough that they poked a hole into the containing crust for something similar to a star, just to bleed fire out of it. 

Which should tell you just how desperate they were.

The Spire is the heart of the Everburning City. It is the fire that can never go out. It is the flame that The City and everyone that lives in it is sheltered by.

But to know what the Spire is, you need to know what the Bore is.

The Bore is a wound in the earth. A roughly fourteeen mile deep chasm carved with the Craft, by a team of a hundred Crafters. This bore punched through the rocks and sediment of the earth, into the fires beneath. It was theorized that whatever lies beneath the earth is a potential source of immense fire.

And from that chasm, fire erupts.

This untempered wound in the earth has created a column of flame with no perceivable termination point. The height of the spire is a popular research topic in the Guild. If the Spire is diminishing in height, it's impossible to tell. Tests of the luminosity of the Spire, because you had better believe people do that in the City, regard the Spire's thermal and luminosity to be largely unchanged.

With that in mind, here are some cool factoids about the Spire that may not be completely clear in the books.

-I don't know how tall the Spire is. But I'm willing to tell you that it's visible from well beyond the Last Wall.

-In terms of the size of the Spire, the closest approximation is a Space Elevator. The Spire stretches beyond the troposphere, possibly beyond the stratosphere. Theoretically, if the Spire is tall enough, it is visible from half of the world.

-The Spire is a rapidly ascending jet of plasma. No, not like your blood plasma. More like the surface of the sun plasma. The jet of fire is tens of thousands of degrees, and the only reason it doesn't cook the atmosphere is the air immediately surrounding it is so thin that heat doesn't transfer well. 

-The Spire isn't straight. It actually curves west, following the sun. The reason for that is the Jet travels in a straight line, but the world the Spire ejects from spins and moves. 

-The above point does mean that the Spire has an end. Otherwise, you could potentially see a ring of fire around the world.

-Despite most of the heat from the Spire not transferring, the Spire does affect most of the world's weather. How could it not? Hot air is constantly rising around the Spire, drawing cold air in low, towards the City. 

-The Spire's luminosity is similar to the Sun during a 95% eclipse. It will blind you if you look directly at it for too long. (Oddly enough, not true if you're a Crafter. But they're weird) 

-The City's fires are drawn directly from the Spire. Using unnaturally effective thermal resistant ceramics (no, there's no metallurgic justification for this, but I'm not writing hard SciFi here) the flow is redirected and guided through ceramic pipes coated in metal to every part of the City.

-The City also has thousands of little tributary flames, that mark the distribution lines. This serves to regulate the pipe pressure, as the pipes can only handle so much. After all, this is basically skimming the surface of the sun with pipes. (Yes, this started as an in-world justification for the cool effect of having a city constantly lit by torchlight. It looks awesome in my head) This actually becomes an important plot point.

I'll probably add more to that list later, but this should give you an idea of what I thought of when I started writing the Spire.