One thing I can say about writing essays for the last six months is that my writing is a lot more polished on the first draft now. After a little overhaul and a touch of polishing, I’d like to let you have a sneaky peek at the City Moths introduction.

Introduction – Dexton

Welcome to Thorn City, a collection of soulless beings and rancid corporations that fight over the scraps left of our humanity.

At the heart of this godforsaken hive stands the Nu-Era Tower, it’s an ever-present light that lingers through drizzle and smog that crept into the city around about the same time that anything still pure and untouched decided it was best to creep out and run like hell. Nu-Era holds all the cards when it comes to water and power in the city, they own the ageing hydro stations at the coast, sucking in the poisoned remnants of the sea to make clean water and spewing out over priced voltage to the inner populous.

Surrounding the towers and bathed in its perpetual luminosity is the urban dwelling of those privileged enough to afford the clean water and electricity. Upmarket new-build apartments, fully equipped with all the latest commodities for a comfortable living and it’s a living most of us don’t even dare to dream of.

The further away from Thorns centre you get though, the lower the lifestyle and the higher the prices for living. These gloomy outskirts are infested by every soul who aimed high but fell far, finding themselves stuck in an unending fight for the light. Their aged stoves stoked to life by meagre wood supplies scavenged from the Ruins, the seemingly ceaseless rubble that surrounds the city that act as a reminder of what once stood before the world was burnt.

In the shadows of the city outskirts, beyond the festering waters of the great trenches and where the wet roads meet the lifeless dirt of the Ruins, the individuals shunned from all the cities of the Southern River strive to survive. Washed out with the rest of the waste with nothing left to fight for. Many of these Shunned beings are lost in their addiction to a drug known as Black Sand, living out their remaining days in ramshackle shelters. In an eerie silence, they huddle around dwindling fires wait to wither away.

Back on the back roads of the city, where electricity and bottled water cost more than teen hookers make in a month, money has been replaced by the need of tokens to feed the persistently hungry electricity meters. It’s also here that you will find the ever-glowing mile of neon light known as the Tavern Trail. This buzzing strip is home to the bars and strip joints that lowlife cockroaches adore and thrive around, their shelter from the endless deluge that pours through the grey sky.

It’s someway along Tavern Trail, however, that you will find the Cherry Den. It may not seem unlike the other bars with its nicotine-stained ceiling and lipstick tarnished shot glasses, yet in the back room lies the difference; no high-stakes poker game is hosted here, in fact, it’s a meeting of a very different kind. The meeting belonging to an order of hired guns whose members are skilled at parting particular persons from that ever annoying habit of breathing.

In the room lit only by a single free swinging light bulb and where the smoke coils around undisturbed by fresh air, there is a large, round table with eight seats. Each of these seats is occupied with licenced assassin waiting for work.

I’m there, the one looking like death warmed up and feeling much the same, sitting next to a blue haired girl who has yet to shut up talking.

This, this is our story.