Scroll this way
The Floating City

This image serves two key purposes, to show again the glorious pteranodons, this time ridden by Rillu and Ivanno, and as a last-minute addition, the gold automaton; and to show the floating city, a strange thing that defies any simple description. The city, which often behaves more like an enormous aircraft, is based on the Puṣpaka Vimāna that appears in the Hindu epic Rāmāyaṇa. It is described in myriad ways, sometimes as large as a city, but often is described as a “chariot”. It can travel around the world in minutes and can rise and fall at will. I lifted several aspects of the Vimāna: that it is used to abduct the princess, that it wielded by a great demon king to terrify the world, and that it is used in the end to rescue us from that demon’s island fortress and carry us home. Like the automata, it provided a wonderful element of ancient legend that today seems more at home in science fiction.