Notes About The Poem
A harsh environment of sulfuric rain, powdered rust, and relentless winter leaves Vaelorian survivors trapped underground.
Vaeloria Chapter 6 - The Iron Cradle (Year Eight)
Chapter 6 - The Iron Cradle (Year Eight)
The sky above Vaeloria was born of heavy iron,
A bruised and breathless canopy where winter came to die.
No gold had touched the mountain crest, no light had blessed the plain;
The world was but an empty husk baptized in sulfuric rain.
Lysander breathed the bunker air within the Sector Three,
A child of dark who never knew a green and living tree.
His lungs were trained on powdered rust, his eyes on neon cold,
A witness to the bitter ash of stories over-told.
To him, the mythic warlords were a shudder in the floor,
The rattling of the iron plates, the shifting of the door.
They caved the hydroponic racks and broke the meager rye,
While far above the deadened clay, the masters of the sky—
The automated hunter-drones, the legacy of steel—
Patrolled the grey, abandoned hills that time forgot to heal.
Blind to the shifting politics, loyal to the ancient dead,
They hunted any living thing that dared to raise its head.
Lysander grew in narrow shafts, a creature of the vents,
His spine was curved and twisted by the tunnels' hard constraints.
He spent his early childhood cramped inside the copper lines,
A bent and broken tinkerer who mapped the dead designs.
But though his back was crooked as the pipes that gave him room,
His hands were long and elegant, defiant of the gloom.
They did not shake, they did not slip, they held a steady grace,
Like instruments of precision in a dark, forgotten face.
While other children scavenged for the casings of the war,
To trade for flasks of heavy water on the market floor,
Lysander sought the silicon, the glass, the shattered lens,
The dying glowing filaments where logic meets and ends.
He dragged them to the Sunken Spire**, a shaft of cold cement,
Three hundred meters deep into the planet's deep descent.
An old, entombed laboratory where physics once had bloomed,
Before the fracture tore the earth and all its dreams entombed.
*Lysander is a young child living in Sector Three of a bleak, post-apocalyptic world named Vaeloria. Raised in an underground bunker filled with rust and cold neon light, he has never seen a green tree or real sunlight. His physical form was warped by his surroundings; growing up inside copper lines and narrow air vents left his spine curved and twisted. Despite this physical impairment, he possesses remarkably steady, precise, and elegant hands. While other children scavenge war casings to trade for water, Lysander is a skilled tinkerer who gathers discarded technology—silicon, glass lenses, and broken electronics—and takes them deep into an abandoned underground laboratory called the Sunken Spire to map and rebuild their designs.
**Sunken Spire - an ancient, entombed laboratory located 300 meters beneath the ground inside a shaft of cold cement. Once a center where physics flourished before a global fracture shattered Vaeloria, it now serves as a subterranean sanctuary where Lysander brings salvaged technology, glass lenses, and silicon to study, map, and rebuild their designs.
Post Comments
Poetrysoup is an environment of encouragement and growth so only provide specific positive comments that indicate what you appreciate about the poem. Negative comments will result your account being banned.
Please
Login
to post a comment