The people of the city of Istantinople were gathering outside the city for the year celebration in honor of the God Solinaye. This was the one time that the restrictions on everyone’s behavior and movement had been lifted since the new regime took power, and people were taking full advantage of the fact that said new regime knew fuck-all about how this particular city celebrated.

The people ‘partied’ by going ever farther away from the city itself, slowly inching their ‘celebration’ further from the walls and from the eyes of the zealots. Everyone who wanted to get the fuck out and cross the border turned out to be very surprised when they found that they were not alone in their idea, and this led to the slow, gradual movement speeding up ever so slightly. Once people were fully aware that they were not alone in their desire to leave and take a risk in crossing the border as refugees (even during the middle of a war), the mass of rebellious mortals began to be ever bolder in their actions.

For so long, the grip of the new order had held them so tight that they assumed that everyone aside from their family were ‘in’ with the new way of doing things. Now that they knew that not only were they not alone in their desire, but also that they were among nearly 60% of the city’s populace in opinion (more or less), it gave them a sense of confidence and courage that the New Sultanate had desperately tried to keep from rising.

This was all well and good, but all the confidence in the world would not stop them from falling into the hands of the New Sultanate. As you might expect from a tyrannical, autocratic, theocratic police-state, there was a sort of secret police at their disposal. Although they called it the Inquisition, it was just a far more visible version of something like the KGB or Gestapo, but overwhelmingly colored by a fanatical devotion to a single religion. Although they played the fool, the people in control knew that people were going to try and run and fully intended to make the effort as costly and brutal as possible. While they would not be able to stop everyone, they would do their best to cut down as many traitorous heathens and heretics as possible, leaving the world all the purer.

The new regime’s plan to ambush the roughly 60% of the city’s people that were about to run would have gone off without a hitch, but then, as usual, Darksol thwarted their plans.

…

“What is that?”

A single voice in the crowd went mostly unheard, at least until it was combined with other, equally confused voices asking similar questions. This was likewise true with the zealots who were supposed to ambush the fleeing civilian refugees, causing said civilians to realize that their individual and eventually group plans had been discovered. Now, what were these people looking at to give them such an unsure state of mind?

Well, to be brutally honest, none of them had ever seen an airship before, let alone a hot-air balloon, so the sight of what they thought were steel clouds floating in the air sent many still in the city running for shelter. Some thought this was a sign from Solinaye or some other God/ Goddess, and in a way they were right. As the metal… things took position over the fortress city, homes, they erupted with artillery fire and dropped bombs without any sense of accuracy or tactical intent, setting the ancient city ablaze.

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This was reason enough for the New Sultanate’s forces to abandon the ambush and essentially let the civilians go and do what they wanted unsupervised and unguarded, which was an opportunity that not a single one of them passed up. As the overhanging shadows kept attacking, the men on the ground scrambled to fight back. Arrows would not reach the metal monsters, and neither would bolts loosed from crossbows or lead balls fired from primitive guns. Nothing could reach high enough to visibly harm the angry metal clouds that rained fire and destruction down on Istantinople and shot after shot from the armada of flying warships struck the city, leveling buildings and setting more of the place on fire.

Eventually, someone got the bright idea to aim one of the very, very old ‘cah-nuns’ leftover from the reign of the First Sultan at one of the airborne ships, but this had… mixed results. The primitive cannon did fire its stone projectile at the airship it was targeting, and the round did hit home, but the stone sphere reduced itself to bits and pieces upon impact and the ship seemed not to have even been dented.

Well, that and the cannon literally exploded in the faces of those who had used it. As it turns out, having a cannon just lying around for more than 1000 years will make said weapon very unsafe to use, even if it had been ‘properly maintained’ the whole time, and overpacking the barrel with powder in an effort to compensate for aiming at a target far outside its effective range only makes things that much worse.

With that display of foolishness complete, the zealots of the New Sultanate decided that if they could not attack the metal behemoths in the sky, they would at least outlast them. Supporters of the new regime fled to the city sewers to escape the bombardment, but this was ultimately not a very good idea. The sewers were old and had not been effectively maintained in over a century, which meant that the place was full of flammable gasses and materials ripe for an accidental detonation. The air quality was so bad, that people had to huddle together around a Mage in order to even be able to breathe down there, but all it took for the entire sewer system to go off like the Fourth of July was the act of a single man trying to light his pipe.

With that one flame, the entire sewer system was overwhelmed with pressure, heat, and fire. The poorly maintained brickwork down there could not handle the near-instant shifts in pressure and heat and, combined with the bombardment from above, caused a decent portion of the city to collapse in on itself. As flames engulfed the city and the last few standing structures either dropped down into the collapsing sewers or were pulverized by the bombs and guns from above, a pair of heirs watched the firestorm with a twisted sense of glee in their eyes.

“Zarbon, Dodoria, what lovely fireworks!”

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”

“Burn, baby, burn!”

“Disco inferno?”

“Nah, not enough drugs and weird clothing.”

The Twins shared an amused glance at each other before turning back to the growing inferno that was ravaging the former impediment to their ally’s movement.

“Well, at least that issue is dealt with. Now, what do we call what we will make in its place?”

“We can always go with the old reliable.”

“And that is?”

“City McCityface.”

“No. Just, no.”

“Worth a shot.”