Breaking writers' block: Attempt #2

From atop the mountain, the world was a mangled wasteland, disfigured by invisible fumes rising out of the soil it trampled upon. Humankind was not to be seen, drowned as they had been as insignificant vermin under the weight of its own beating fists, and Terenthal seemed to be populated only by buildings, roads and prisons. Inflexible chains held down walls and fortresses, preventing them from swaying in the face of the fierce political winds now whipping their disinterested faces.

It was only unfortunate that the chains themselves surrendered their will not to wisdom or the promise of emancipation but simply to ignorance. One day, they would crumble under the weight of the simple but prodigious Terenthalian legacy, brought down from the inside as they sharpened iron blades to defend against enemies from beyond the southern and western borders.

All this Kaschan could see clearly. What he couldn’t was what no one else could, what no one else even bothered to look for: humanity. Along the eastern horizon, the first of the two stars was rising, its sharp glow throwing in sharp relief the Mayen Ridge that stretched along for thousands of miles from the east to the northern gates of the city, its orange depths silent but for the distant gushing of the Falls of Jacuruku.

The city of Terenthal, or Father’s Earth, seemed to emanate as a wide ellipse from beneath the mountain Kahg, concentric sections of the city slowly blossoming as her eyes widened from a milky white to an abject brown.

The flat-roofed villas were set on higher ground than the rest of the city, and perhaps it was the only way so: soil dug out from beyond the Mayen basin had been piled into large mounds and then flattened, ramps fashioned along the side for the carts of wealth and food to use. Beyond the villas, the ground quickly seemed to plummet a distance of more than sixty feet, the native black soil scorched by the blazing suns.