Story Seed - Lens

Image Source: http://tryingtofly.deviantart.com/art/The-old-observatory-500978019

The rings towered into the sky. Broken pieces jutting upward from the ground like half buried ribs of some colossal being. The largest were all broken, fragments of them lay around the structure creating artificial barriers. Nearest the ground, where the center of the once whole device lay, there were a handful of rings that remained intact, partially buried in earth they provided a glimpse at what form the ancient machine once looked like.

When it was whole it must have consisted of dozens of concentric rings, joined to each other with radial spokes in such as way as to create a massive concave, or perhaps convex, who could be certain, edifice of steel and glass and other materials exotic and unknown. Stranger still whatever technology created the ring still powered them. Those that were broken rained sparks down upon the ground in streamers of dazzling motes. While those that were still whole thrummed with power, humming and vibrating as energies coursed through them, illuminating the rings from within.

At the center, within the circle of the smallest of the rings there was light; it did not seem to have a source, but instead the very space within seemed to glow. To those who knew to look for it, or who got close to the rings they could see that the light was not the only effect of the remaining rings; the very air around them seemed to warp and churn, bending to contain the light to a confined column of brightness.

Closer still and it became evident to those brave souls that it was not the air that was being bent, but the very space around the rings. That there was not just light being contained but heat and other energy. Moving close enough to enter the area of the ring's influence was impossible, despite their efforts the rings did not contain the power entirely and the warping of reality itself added further danger.

Still the curious persisted. Aided by power technologies and armors they strove to gain closer access to the working rings, to try and understand them, to see what it was at the center that provided such power as to change the very shape of the world.