There Is A City

There exists, or so it is whispered in hushed voices by the wise in those places of the world were great secrets are known, an Invisible City.  It is the centre and the beating heart of a vast unknowable empire.  Four diverse quarters span this uncertain terrain; alien zones pushing outwards in each cardinal direction.  Together they form a shifting endless sphere of city, each with their own ruling species, and not all of them human.  On the land, under the earth, beneath the waves, and high above the broken spires, each zone a part of this most secret of metropolises.  The great quarters of the city sprawl further fragmented into a mosaic pieced together from a thousand strange districts and unnumbered lesser wards.  Communes which like their denizens, can not all be sure of lying beneath the same sun and moon as their brethren.  Amid the ruins of long forgotten shrines and ancient boulevards, its citizen walk in circles, hands set perpetually upon each other’s shoulders, blindly seeking the way; each one following the next but none knowing where they go.  It is a city whose greatest walls are built not out of stones but of secrets.  Nameless and overlooked, it hides itself from the finding.  It is a city which has had so many names over the long march of eons that now in the present thin age of our day it has none.  There are of course those who argue that such a city belongs to no more than the annals of myth; a story told by passing fire-licked travelers to hold back the darkness and bifurcate the night.  To those who think such a capital a physical impossibility, these tales are not worth the re-telling save to be presented as evidence of the easy credulity and simplistic superstitions of those whose current state has not moved far apace from the primitive.  They are, of course, wrong and on all counts.  For the city exists, sat behind its occluded walls like a transparent spider hidden in the silken funnel of its web; a principality not of the lands on which it touches, but a wedge, an opening, a void of an un-place which hangs cradled like a crack in the walls of the world.

Welcome then traveler, welcome to the Invisible City.

E.