Twelve score and four years ago,
the Founders crash-landed in a new world.
After fleeing the war-scathed Old Continent, the City of Heaven's Founders escaped across the Poison Sea to create their utopia in an unspoiled, jungle-bound world. 245 years after the Founding, and riddled by political tension, solar power shortages, and dangerous magical storms, the revolution in Heaven isn't a question, it's a who-dun-it.
Felix has been spiraling downward to the beat of his own drum since his sister's death and the Wizard College expulsion proceedings that followed one liquor-soaked year ago. Between then and now he's tried hard to forget what he saw in those laboratories, living as an outcast in the lower Heaven slums, working shitty jobs, and "helping" on monster-hunting-for-hire trips with his roommate Vic, a gutter-born tryhard with his good focused on gaining clout through the Ranger's Guild.
With the first of the month coming, the roommates are in need of quick cash. The scheme Vic comes up with pulls them deeper into the lush jungle surrounding the City than ever before, but even after parachuting out of the Aeromobile they can't escape Heaven's problems or their own. Despite Felix's best efforts to drift aimlessly, the rapidfire revelations of this trip to the forest force his eyes open.
Influenced by books like Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and Neal Stephenson's more fantasy-heavy work, I of the Storm follows the revolution of a fantasy city that remixes the Mesoamerican Conquista, French Revolution, and our own frenzied post-modern economy.
Lower Heaven is a five-part series exploring cultural myths and realities in the speculative, solarpunk, Lower Heaven universe. This one is for the growing sector of disenchanted millennials: young people driven to nihilism, conspiracy culture, and mysticism by the ludicrous political and economic circumstances of now, and more importantly, the unwitting quest for what comes next.
