Incendiary Skies

The world was torn asunder. Oceans boiled away into superheated steam, mountains crumbled into great trenches, and continental plates fractured like fragile porcelain. Lava flows cast a perpetual crimson glow beneath impenetrable clouds of volcanic ash and razor sharp fragments of glass.   And yet both life and civilisation clings on, by tooth and by nail. Towns and cities spread out over the tops of the green-topped high mesas.   Airships sail through these incendiary skies slung beneath brightly coloured canopies. They fly, driven on the winds on fin-like sails, or propelled against it on engines of tangled brass pipes and bellowing oily black smog.