When she wakes up, she's lying on dirt and stones, uncomfortably warm.

Not far in front of her, there's a small house - made of roughly-cut stone and clay, with old-fashioned thatch for a roof - and a small, orderly garden.

If she looks around, she'll see that she's in a mountainous valley. But probably her attention will instead point north, because there is an enormous stone tower looming over the landscape.

The Spire is taller than the mountains, and it's not close. It stands alone in what's probably the middle of the valley. It's like an Ancient Greek decorated column writ large, but it's not supporting anything - there's just a flared-out capital with nothing to connect to, a few spurs equally spaced pointing in all directions. There are also faint glowing runes in vertical lines along the spire's surface, but it's too far to make them out, even the ones close to the base.

....Uhhhhhhh.

Uh. 

Huh? What even? 

She remembers the lorry sliding, and panicking. Then... Nothing.

................Is this Heaven? It's warm. And the spire...

No, she still hurts. A bruise, and the lingering hunger of half rations.

First order of business, she takes off the heavy metal lantern device, then takes off the outer coat, and then a jacket and the long pants too. A sweater and light trousers is still pretty warm. It's way too hot to wear all that.

Then she gapes at the titanic spire some more.

It's pretty gape-worthy! Even people who've lived under its shadow their whole lives sometimes gape at it.

It will be pretty obvious, looking at it, that it is much more finely-built than that house she saw before she looked up. It's not one smooth piece of stone five hundred stories tall, but there look to be solid pieces five stories tall. And, you know, it's about ten times taller than the tallest building she's ever heard of.

That thing should be collapsing! The stones would have to be stronger than diamond, or lighter than air- No, it'd blow over in the wind - or actively supported somehow!

She tries to look for landmarks she can use to estimate the height and diameter. Because what even! She should have heard about this!

There are scattered low stratus clouds below the top of the Spire. Near the top, but solidly below it, probably 85% of its height.

She's far enough away that it's not easy to make out the structures at the base, though there are some - stone, mostly a lighter color that resembles the color of the nearby mountains more than the Spire does. It looks to have multiple concentric rings and a castle-like appearance.

Also if she looks past the mountains, she'll see, in the far distance, another one. Off to the north-east, probably five times as far away as this one.

A whole NETWORK perhaps! What are they for? Aerial ports? Semaphore? "God, how do you build that, this is giving me sparky feelings..."

"Kyros only knows. If that."

While she was distracted, the homeowner(?) has quietly walked around the corner and started observing her. (Removing her equipment made some noticeable clanking.)

"Who are you, traveler, who sits on my homestead and looks at a Spire like you've never heard of them?"

She jumps, turns around quickly, and scrambles over towards her lantern. More instinct than plan, she's not even sure what to do with it.

"-Ah. That would be because I've never seen it before? I am... Very lost. Waltana Hampson."

"You must be. They say there is no land in Terratus where you cannot see a Spire at noon. I'm Essa of River's Break in Vendrien's Well, formerly of the Queen's Royal Army of Vendrien, of Apex."

Essa looks about sixty if she's well-preserved - and she's in good physical shape despite her age - or fifty and less so - her teeth don't look great and she has a number of scars. Her clothes are homespun, and pretty crude homespun at that; faded green and orange leather, with more knots than fasteners, and the few metal pieces coppery.

Rock construction. Straw roof. Copper buttons and a rough sack of a shirt. Huh.

She's perhaps fifteen at most, herself. The clothes are machine-woven. Neat and tidy by comparison. And there's all sorts of iron on her. The lantern is still glowing with a bright filament behind glass. She flips it off when she notices.

"Then I guess I'm of... The Bristol Shipbuilders, of England. Have you happened to hear of a disastrous winter lasting a full year, with deadly storms that scour the whole world? Or of metal machines that burn coal to produce motive power? Oh, am I, uh, trespassing?"

"No, no, and yes but I'm not inclined to send you away."

"I imagine Kyros could arrange a worldwide Edict of Cold if he wished to, but thankfully he'd rather tax us. I have no idea how you'd turn fire into motion, though I know very little of what can be done with iron and spellcraft beyond 'crushing conquests'."

"Engineering is not sorcery. It's all just energy in the end." She frowns. "Kyros- God?"

"Might as well be, but no. The Overlord, ruler of the entire continent, and unless the sailor's fables about the Hidden Lands are true the entire world. He recently conquered the Tiers, this peninsula - Vendrien's Well is at the center of the Tiers, between the Bastard City and the other Younger Realms."

"...Yeah, extremely lost. That's not good. The last thing I remember was a probably lethal accident during our evacuation. Rockslide."

"Looking rather healthy for a lethal accident. I suppose I ought to doubt you, but your clothing looks like nothing I can imagine making and that light artifact is made with more iron than you can find in most houses. So I'm not sure it's actually more unbelievable."

"Speaking of houses, would you like to come in and sit on a chair instead of the dirt?"

"Uh- Hmm. Okay, I mean, sorry if I'm a bit rude thinking out loud here, but I don't know how paranoid I have to be? I would not attack someone who doesn't attack me first or otherwise do some sort of evil, that's just civil society and all, but I'm a stranger here so I might be in a kind of paranoid mood. I mean, as far as weapons, I..."

Bridging the contacts for a nicely deterring shock out of the lantern's battery should be easy, at the very least.

Oop, she's holding a screwdriver from her dropped toolbelt, the spark is trying to come up front. She'd better wait on that for now. She delicately puts the tool back.

"...Should not think about that right this second, possibly. I don't know the customs here, it's making me feel very cautious, I don't intend to be rude with it."

"I can lend you a knife, I'm not afraid of what you could do with it. But I'll need it back, I can't grow bronze in my garden. Customs are - changing. Kyros's Law is not our old law, and many old customs are now forbidden."

"Hell, I have a knife in here, it's just a work knife, for kindling and whittling, not a bloody sword." She sighs and stands. "Thank you for the welcoming offer. I think I'll take you up on it, just let me gather this up."

"I can take in the clothing, if you like. I wouldn't recommend traveling the roads without a proper weapon; there are bandits, if fewer than is usual after a war, and until you swear to Kyros's service you're not a citizen and not protected by law. But the valley is a civilized place, and the army occupying it are - bigoted bastards, but disciplined, and honorable after a fashion."

"Sure. Don't suppose you know a mountain climber who could use a very warm coat? And it sounds like I had better hear more about Kyros and his army and this valley, too. Does Kyros rule himself, or perhaps appoint lords to do it for him?"

No chance of any kind of Parliament, after all.

"No, and I suspect you'd get more rings selling it to a craftsman who could study it in any case. As I understand it, Kyros delegates primarily through his Archons. The Tiers are still unusual, though, because two Archons and their armies were sent to conquer us, and they are currently at war with each other because they both think the other is a scoundrel and a traitor. And then a third Archon's servant, the Fatebinder Kohl, was sent in to deliver an Edict, and then did something, and now controls the Spire itself, all the way to the top. Which is unprecedented, and I would have said impossible, except I saw the lines of energy spiral up the Spire's sides with my own eyes."

"Civil war. Joy and celebration. What do the Spires do? Edicts?"

She's gathered up the lantern and her toolbelt now.

Essa gathers the clothes, looking briefly surprised when she notices the amount of steel iron fasteners.

"People say a lot of things about Spires, little of it with any evidence to back it up. Edicts are something Kyros does to enforce his will. Off north-east, in what used to be Azure, he declared an Edict of Stone - one of the Fatebinders proclaimed it, not the same one as here. It was something like 'Any Archon who does not submit will be brought to Kyros's justice. Therefore, let the foundations of Azure be shattered and life drained from the land for as long as the traitor Archon of Stone draws breath.' And so they had massive earthquakes, and what used to be good farmland is now a broken hellscape of stone plateaus."

The jacket and long pants have plenty of sturdy buttons and latches, but the huge wooly overcoat has a metal gorget and a hard plate in the upper back. There's a hose attached to the suit's back, leading off to the lantern. Waltana twists the metal cap, twisting it off and revealing a small hole. It also feels like there are stiff tubes or wires inside the thick coat.

"...Lots of magic, it's sounding like? Or at least mighty powers nobody truly understands being thrown around? It's tragically much easier to destroy than to create. We didn't have Archons or Edicts- Geniuses of crafting and mighty war machines are the arbiters of power, to me."