The Stormrider Beast exhales a gout of steam from its battered vents as iron wings shudder to stillness. Around you, the air hangs thick—a miasma of scorched copper and something deeper, something like the breath of a long-fallen machine. The Bastion stretches below, its jagged silhouette swallowing the horizon in jagged teeth of brass and storm-bitten glass. Lightning shudders between its towers, throwing fractured shadows across landing platforms worn smooth by generations of desperate arrivals.

Your boots settle on grooved plating, the metal still warm from the storm’s passage. Nearby, two Fleet aristocrats linger beneath the flickering glow of an oil-fed lamp, their respirators sighing vapor tinted with the cloying sweetness of volt-gin. One adjusts the corset of hydraulics cinched around her ribs; the pistons hiss like serpents. "Another ghost without mooring," she murmurs, her voice muffled beneath a mask of filigreed gold. Her companion shifts, the copper threads woven into his cloak humming with trapped electricity.

Upon the scaffolded dark—the clank of piston-driven steps. A Bolt-Brethren engineer emerges from the gloom, his beard a tangle of spinning mechanisms and corroded dials. He does not speak. Instead, he lifts a wrench crusted with dried solder and taps it once against his thigh. The sound resonates like a hammer striking the ribs of a hollow god. Behind him, the Bastion groans, a deep, grinding hum that travels through the platform’s bones and into your boots.

The wind twists, carrying the scent of burning insulation and something older, something like rust and wet stone. Above, the storm you fled convulses against the Bastion’s underbelly, its lightning lashing in slow arcs. The aristocrats turn away, their footsteps clicking against the grated walkway. The dwarf watches, unmoving, as molten metal drips from his wrench and seethes into the plating beneath your feet.