Stairway Tower

Skyscraping monument to the legacy of the Hidden Empire

The Strijder emerged from the bunker under a shroud of shadow. When he gazed upwards he saw that the sky was blotted out by a massive tower of steel and glass. Burnt wreckage and blasted steel lay in rusted heaps of char and ash all around the base of the structure. Despite scorched blast points of shattered glass exposing twisted girders and pulverized concrete, signs of a mighty struggle, the tower remained intact and structurally sound.

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Wind whistled around and through the building's exposed frame. There were no other sounds to be heard. Walking away from the looming structure, the Strijder passed through an archway of steel and stone. Upon it he saw the barest outline of a faded glyph: the mark of the Fourfold Covenant.

Landmark
Type: Skyscraper
Alternate Names: Skyland Spire, The Stairway
This former headquarters of the Princes' Hidden Empire became a ruin in 973 PCE.

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Introduction

This massive sky-scraping structure is located on the island of Manhatten and was once the sanctuary fortress of the The Hidden Empire. Since the defeat of the Princes it has been guarded by Merikan troopers and largely unoccupied. For a time, authorities of the Merikan Union sought to explore and exploit the secrets hidden within the ruins of the Stairway, but the intervention of Janov Seldon and Jimmy Nails ended their operations.

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Purpose / Function

Started in 471 PCE ,the Stairway Tower was built to serve as the fortress of the Hidden Empire when Jost Desaad established his political hegemony among the Zones of Skyland. The tower functioned as a military base, a research facility, and a transport and communications hub for the Princes' global operations.

Standing at a height of over 900 feet the imposing Stairway Tower fulfilled a further, perhaps more important function. For nearly half a century the tower's long shadow served evidence of the Princes' dominance and held the people of the Skyland zones in the grip of the Tetrarchy's invincible power.

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Architecture

Built upon the superstructure of an ancient, Precursor-era skyscraper, the tower is composed of a central support core of steel girders, built upon a foundation of concrete, and clad in sheets of black steel and reflective black glass. Construction of the Stairway Tower lasted for 25 years and required the labour of over 10,000 Skyland serfs, most of whom were culled from Delphi Zone. The descendants of these labourers, those who survived, became the class of Servitor slave technocrats used by the Princes to administer the Princes' technocratic bureaucracy and infrastructure.

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History

The Prince known as XHAN arrived in the Tempus Zone of Skyland in the year 426 and embarked on a 50-year campaign of conquest. The brief era of peace and cooperation that had been inaugurated at the Guidestone Assembly during the Vril Invasion of 417 came to an end as the destabilizing force of XHAN's steel legion provoked a conflict between the Skyland Zones known as the Skyland Clan War.

The Clan War ended when the Zones were forced to pay homage to the Princes' new regime at a ceremony of surrender conducted in the ruins of ancient Manhattan. During this ritual the clan leaders were compelled to relinquish their Precursor relics and word frags. At this point a shrouded figure emerged from the ranks of the Steel Legion and XHAN himself knelt before the stranger. Bowed in prostration, XHAN pledged the newly-subdued Skyland Zones to the service of a new globe-spanning empire and rose to take his place at the right hand of his nameless master, the Prime Tetrarch who who would be known as the Unknown Overlord for the next 400 years.

The Overlord commanded that a Tower be raised in honour of his new world empire, an empire of the mind that would control the collective imagination of humanity and guide the renewed progress of human civilization for the millennium to come. According to the Overlord, the Stairway Tower would serve as the catalyst for a new spirit in the human evolutionary project, a beacon to lead the human race out of the dark age of post-cataclysmic decay and into a golden age of peace and enlightenment.

The Overlord, eventually revealed to be Jost Desaad, failed to achieve these lofty ambitions and his Stairway Tower, rather than a beacon of the human spirit's highest ideals, became a monument to the fear and loathing that Desaad's Hidden Empire would come to inspire.

The Princes were defeated during the The Battle of New York but the Stairway remains. Goland Revize, entrusted with guardianship of the facility, sealed access to the Tower's upper levels and ensured that its automated defence systems would remain active.

For a time, the Merikan Union conspired to send exploratory research missions into the Stairway, but these efforts were thwarted when Janov Seldon and Jimmy Nails inadvertently materialized in the Stairway matter transference chamber (November, 997 PCE). Union soldiers apprehended the pair and tried to interrogate them but they escaped and exposed the Merikan tech recovery operation to the Nehark technoclasts, causing an uproar severe enough to end the mission and significantly set back the Merikan Union's goal of achieving mastery of industrial technology. Today the Tower is guarded by the blade masters of Nehark's Sacred Sword Society.