There is no night in the Everburning City.
There can never be.
Also, the Everburning City is a fairly complicated thing. Even as the author, I need copious amounts of notes to keep it all together.
For any reader of the expanding series taking pl...
It featured fairly heavily in The Dragon Chase, had a small appearance in Burning Night, and I can promise we haven't seen the last of it.
It's a small area of the City called 'The Channel', a man made diversion in the river that surrounds the Spire.
Distance from theSpire to the walkway on the far side of the Channel: about 2500 feet, or a little under half a mile. So the whole thing is about seven-tenths of a square mile.
There is a mandatory event that everyone in the City is obliged to undertake at least once in their lives. It is known as the three mile pilgrimage, where every citizen in the City walks the perimeter of the Channel, with nothing except that half mile of water separating them from the Spire.
Unofficially, it serves as a way to discover a potential Crafter. Service exists are 'accidentally' left open so that someone drawn to the Spire can slip away from a crowd and try to get closer, and every pilgrimage is crawling with shadows.
The Channel itself serves two purposes. It makes directly accessing the Spire extremely difficult, and it serves as a last-ditch effort to drown the Spire if it, for some reason, turns on the City.
Here's a conceptual sketch.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Now that I take a good look at it, it just looks like someone's pouring molten metal into a birthday cake...
But the structure of it is there. It's a diverted portion of the river, and the small island is a flood wall serving as the only thing separating the Spire from the river. The piped fire along the walls indicate that the emergency lines are working still, ready to close-off and detonate, destroying the levee walls.
By the way, as always, if someone with actual artistic talent wants to take a stab at any of this, please do.
