The golden city is quiet. The sun overhead beats down on its glittering synchrotron towers and labyrinthine infrastructure, a network of spires all pointed toward the same bright dome, a blooming glass lily hushing in its thousandfold helical halls. It spirals into the clouds.
The city shone so bright that when it was new it hurt the eyes of those who sought it. It was built with alchemical processes by three prophets whose names were unknown. Collectively; they died, were interred, and deified.
Prayer and thought are guided upwards. Beads of knowledge form, like bright jewels of information. Centuries of condensed lives and lore reduced to trinkets perfectly arranged in lifeless configurations.
The exactitude of the city bears repeating, like every other aspect of the city. Every inch is fractal, recurring, a pristine reiteration of perfect cycles, pale crystal pipes carrying glowing molten metal.
Nothing alive can survive the burning rays demanding order and perfection. Instead, the dead walk the halls. Their only directive: dictating models of correct understanding to pass on to the unwilling below. Their marble bones shine bright. They do it and call it love.
Love isn't enough, and the world ends from the core outward. Blinking lights flicker, then fade outright. Cooling sterling silver coils roll out and scrape the ground, forming streams through which water hurries. The city is destroyed.
***
A caravan of traders traverse the Silk Road, sharing knowledge and securing rare goods, discussing strange poems on entheogens in a jumble of languages. The group is strong, armed to the teeth with swords, coins, lasers, home-made radios, mules, tanks, tools, and other things so strange they haven't names. It stretches further than the eye can see, a giant snake of chimerical distortions that rises and falls to create and destroy forms before the eyes; apophenia and pareidolia.
They leap language barriers with a deftness that leaves scholars humbled. They excel at conveying ideas and processes; anything from bedtime stories to the assembly of complicated machines. The snake creeps its way across the twisted and disjointed silks of history, skipping and skimming over significant events, struggling vainly against the gray grit and grime that wears everything down to nothingness.
The travelers move on. Between them, they try to remember the past.
They come across a ruin where the golden bricks still tick and click with steaming heat. A centipede skitters across the baked dirt. One dips in their hand and brings it to his face, sniffing it once, twice, before shaking his head and scattering it to the wind.
It rises in a plume, carried high into the air on a thermal, slowly dispersing the closer it comes to the hot sun. A thousand people watch the dirt fly on its journey and bow their heads in silence. What happened is unknown to the travelers, and cannot be known. No records or recollections remain, the story lost to time. New ones are made.
The travelers move on. Between them, they worship strange gods.
A God that was always a bright golden tower, whose architectural scripture provided guidance and depth, crafted by individuals who never considered themselves divinely touched, unknowingly heeding the call of ancient and recurring dreams. A God whose wiry form will endure long after its fall.
Its worshiper swims in seas of stone, following the curled and convoluted glassy spires, tracing them through miles of cement and concrete. They dip and dive through dozens of nesting structures, acoustically parted like the sea with shouts from power-tripping godkings with empty minds and emptier hearts.
A God of gray iron from the deep desert, dripping ichor from gaping wounds across steel and silver flesh, his ribcage a burned and blackened grille riddled by assault, hydraulics pumping deep below. A God with teeth of cast iron bullets embedded in shattered shards of skull.
His fervent follower is heavily decorated - sigils etched into plated armor, patched and fused with electronic scrap, vacuum tube assemblages strapped in place. He carries an enormous backpack, filled to the brim with antiquarian goods. On his hip are several holsters.
A Goddess of green light and fruit and stories, of songs and poetry and peace without the thrum and throes of swords and smoke and thorns. A Goddess that rises from viridity, three times, to nourish the land and carry the hope of a brighter tomorrow.
Her ardent devotee begins a sermon, singing of endless wandering, eternal stories, the enduring weave kept alive by the cumulative guile, those who toil and test and tease the threads and verse to direct the flow that lets them grow and thrive. She twines and twists a faintly glowing cloth, tinged with green and gray and gold.
The travelers move on.
***
The devotee wakes up at the crack of dawn, golden sunlight spilling across the horizon. Her compatriots are still asleep. This half-hour is her favorite time of the day, sitting alone and waiting for the others to awaken, for warm liquids to pass her lips and cold breakfasts to be eaten. She enjoys the quiet satisfaction that comes with waking before the other two. She never moves until they do.
The three of them have been on the road for longer than they can remember now, and have fallen into a cadence. Her lover and her best friend both enjoy napping far past dawn, curled in an assortment of clothes, blankets, and bodies. Angel wakes up first, and she gives them a fond smile. As usual, Tis must be roused.
Breakfast is a brief affair. Few brains are functional so early, especially without some form of chemical assistance.
"Seso, do you know what day it is?" asks Angel.
"April passes and Summer comes," grumbles Tis. "The waste will eat us first." He has a harsh tone, but anyone could tell he's just being dour. The first hour of the day is always the hardest.
"Waste? I'll die of coffee deficiency before then. We should petition the hydroponicists," her lover responds with a laugh. They elbow her before leaning in with a stage whisper, "wouldn't mind picking up some bud while we're at it, either."
"Angel, you bought half their supply last week," Tis says. Angel waves him off and corrects their tone.
"Regardless of Tis' wicked tongue," Angel continues with a low sigh, "we all know Spring doesn't last forever. We should enjoy the cool while we can."
The day is long. They had made camp in the ruins of some vast city. It might have been shining, once, but it was now nothing more than clumps of concrete punctured with twisted rebar. They move on quickly, not wanting to dwell on the cracked streets and scattered debris.
The majority of the caravan wake before even the devotee, but the massive size of most traveling groups limits their speed. Her group has no such limitations. They make quick pace. They pass by several other groups, sometimes falling into lockstep to chat and trade luxuries and trivialities, sometimes walking side by side for a while with contented silence. More often than not, they remain alone.
The long passages of silence don't bother any of them. Angel particularly enjoyed watching the gray sky pass by overhead, mind aglow with daydreams and prayers and thoughts of a time long past.
Tis knocks them out of their reverie. "Hey Angel, get your girlfriend to tell us a story."
"Hmm?" says Angel, confused at first. "Why not ask her yourself?"
"Because Seso never does anything I ask her to."
They would argue, she was sure, if she didn't shut them up. So she sang. Most of her stories were songs, and this one would be the same. She sings of gold fading to gray blooming to green.
The group makes camp in a lush valley, beneath a sea of stars. They start a campfire and begin conversing, as they are wont to do. They pass around a pipe, roll dice, play games, discuss societal issues, improvise a musical. They begin discussing theology:
"I hear the road wraps 'round the whole world, with neither beginning nor end," says Angel, "it loops through empires and kingdoms of decay. Bountiful oases, mangroves that span continents, desolate sand flats and cloud-capped mountains; it's all out there. It sees it all then bites its own tail."
"That's ridiculous! The world goes on forever in every direction. I've seen it myself," crows Tis.
Seso leans in, hearing something that interests her. "Aha, do I hear you had a vision? Is your patron finally sharing wisdom with you? What did you see? We all know how much you struggle with certain ephemeral aspects..."
"Well... no. I just felt it. Intuitively. Like I suddenly remembered something I've known all my life. Don't act like you've never had beliefs put in your head."
"My head is full of nothing but belief, which is more than I can say of some here."
"I resent that."
Night deepens, and the conversation continues for many hours. They tell the story of themselves, endlessly, in many forms. The hours fall away like sand. Each of them drifts to sleep at their own pace, some slower than others. Seso falls asleep last, with a quiet smile on her face.
-- Tetrahedron is a writer and artist from the Horizon. She writes about the things she sees there and the things she does there.