The Tower of Ghost
The streets were empty. The colleges were silent. Wild animals ruled the parks, and mountainous glass offices stood inches deep with dust.
Every day asteroids fell screaming from the sky and turned what remained into splinters.
But the Tower stood, silent in the mist, breathing old air from the gateway halfway up its height.
There had once been a story that the structure was itself alive, that it fed from the city and grew taller at night. Another tale held that ancient kings stalked its halls, and plotted new lost wars from map rooms high above the clouds.
Others said that all human knowledge was contained within its very walls, recorded on wire, or that the true height of the tower was not actually known, that it was built almost entirely under the Earth, and that it descended all the way into the crust.
But even as those legends died and the river flooded and swirled, the tower remained, and gave solace and a home to the birds, and the dead of the colleges, and the bears, who watched in the darkness of parliament's square.
There would be armies, and marches, kings and houses, rivers of fear and mineshafts and magma. But before all of that there was the pulse, and the echo, and the tower.
From The Tower of Ghost