Under its hollow mountain dome, Nightjar bathes in a close, constant, liquid darkness floated with a hundred thousand sputtering lights. Below are the cavern systems of the tangling seaweed and delicate fish that feed the city’s people and cisterns of springwater that well up from the heart of the world. Tiered streets crisscross above, raw rock and stone dwellings of the ancients honeycombed densely with apartments, market stalls, tea rooms, meandering shops, dusty card parlors, dens of butcher-boys with silver studding their skin. A million pockets of life crowd each other out as they burrow through the ruins of the old city. Gone are the days of the god-queen Anima, who descended into the dark and resides deeper than memory; she and the magic of her reign are barely remembered as more than a curiosity. She buried herself, and the city was all too eager to help. New squats over the old; a nascent electrical grid and puttering tram line stretch thin over the streets, criminal syndicates roaming, squabbling, keeping an uneasy peace where the government can’t.

Two butcher-boys from the Shrike crime syndicate break down the door to an abandoned apartment. The fine things of the couple who lived there are scattered everywhere – a torn scroll dangles off the wall at a precarious angle, shattered glass catches lamplight on bright broken points and crunches underfoot. An Old city lantern, its glowing magical core and colored glass shell crushed dead, lays twisted and broken on the floor like an empty cage. Our nesting pair has long since escaped. One was found in a ratty old bag clogging a canal and delivered topside by a city cisternkeeper; the boys in silver took the problem of this particular strangled corpse among all the poor stiffs in the morgue (and more importantly recouping her husband’s debts to them) upon themselves. Her better (worse?) half is not among the wreckage of their home and life, although his collection of Old city artifacts, broken liquor bottles, and cigarette butts litter the carpet. As his apartment is getting picked clean of what few valuables he left behind in his drunken, panicky haste, he, like many before him, stumbles into the embrace of Nightjar’s darkest depths.