Shadows Drift Over Scrap-Hollow

A day in Scrap-Hollow rarely passes without the city itself changing shape. As Vessel picks through a drifting wreck for forgotten relics, the ghostly presence of Litany stirs at his side, drawing him toward a hidden chamber pulsing with forbidden light. Something ancient is waking beneath the rust.

Vessel jammed his boot into a seam between two groaning hull-plates, reaching for a tarnished gear half-submerged in oily grime. The air tasted of iron and far-off ozone, weight pressing down one moment and vanishing the next. A low vibration rattled the frame as clouds swelled beneath the fractured deck, glowing with the memory of past storms. Litany's cold aura prickled at Vessel’s back; her shadowed form seemed to stretch impossibly across rusted beams, whispering silence rather than words. Behind a buckled bulkhead, light pulsed, unsteady, golden, old. Vessel crouched, fingers tightening on a scavenged rod, just as the metal beneath his feet began to tremble. Litany’s presence grew heavy, chains barely audible over the distant grind of Scrap-Hollow shifting above the cloud-sea.

Scrap-Hollow is a city of drifting wreckage and sentient rust, suspended above endless cloud-seas where gravity malfunctions in unpredictable pockets. Its denizens, forged from debris and memory, survive by scavenging relics of long-forgotten divine wars. Shifting alliances and precarious settlements mark daily life amid the ruins.

Scrap-Hollow lies high above the endless, luminous clouds of Aethelgard, a city stitched together from rusted ship hulls, engine casings, and the bones of god-machines. Gravity here is a fickle thing: on some decks, feet cling with iron certainty; on others, the rust-born float, tethered by cables or the whimsy of magnetic storms. The city's topography is always changing, as entire blocks drift, collide, or are claimed by the slow tectonics of the sky. Life here depends on scavenging. The rust-born, a patchwork people with armor that grows from the debris itself, treat their bodies as both shield and story, marking triumphs and losses in the iron plates they fuse to their skin. The human minority, outsiders by tradition, must barter or steal for scraps to survive, but some earn cautious respect through daring feats or uncanny luck.

Society is loose, held together by necessity and old pacts. Factions like the Skybinders, who worship the broken god-engines, and the Remnant Guild, specialists in celestial salvage, vie for control of precious stable landings. The city remembers the gods’ war in its ghost-haunted hulls and the occasional outburst of divine technology gone wild. Technology is a bricolage of old magics and machine-lore, both revered and feared. Myths walk in shadow: people whisper of spectral wardens, memory-thieves, and rust spirits lurking amid the gloom. For the residents, routine is a balancing act, between the shifting ground, scavenger rivalries, and the heavy weight of history that refuses to fade.