The fractal mountain is a part of nature's architecture where every angle, peak and valley can be explored infinitely. The fractal mountain is a sacred place among the people. There's a legend that anyone who climbs to the top of the mountain will find something priceless.
I was climbing up the mountain when I spotted the monk already at the top. I yelled to ask if he found anything and he answered back in my language with a laugh, saying that he had been looking for it his whole life and when he finally got to the top, there was nothing at all up there. I climbed up to find him laughing in joy as he looked around for something hidden or just an illusion or a treasure chest or something like that. He said that it had been his whole life's goal to get to the top of this mountain and find nothing but emptiness, but then again it wasn't all for nothing since finding what one seeks is its own reward.
Emrald steamship
A Moroccan woman realises that her daughter is moonlight.
An archangel is dripping wet in a frozen pine forest
I want to write a story full of plants and wanderings, with the rhythms of the natural world described explicitly. Warm food and the eventual goal (of Friday) to be safe and loved and loving. I want the main character at the end to be incomprehensible to the character at the start. The main character is a disgraced scholar. They are never given a gender other than not being considered a man, and they love women. ;The plot revolves around The City, the only one that matters. The real conflict in the book is infrathin vs comprehension, or man vs god redux (god most certainly wins), as in would you rather be in total control of your fate, or a part of the world around you? The two are mutually exclusive.;
MC starts all teeth and existential sorrow, and through eldritch experiences, strange love, and wandering the natural world, they find the soft animal that is their body.
The story is told through a collection of short stories about people and cultures unlike our own. Most of the stories involve the MC in some way, but not all. This is an excuse to play with magical realism and the trikaarichera like toy dolls or action figures.
An emerald steamship is following where the moon reflects into the atlantic
The hawk maiden (told as a folk tale)
A historian is researching a culture that records graveyard sites and sunrises, but not kings
I am the beloved of the City
A book full of all the knowledge that the reader has forgotten
The merchants bridge (one of the Citys 12 gates)
There are twelve widely-agreed upon gates of the City (though if one asks a room of ten scholars, they will have 11 opinions on which should be included and what are the proper names)
The merchants bridge (goblin market)
By sea (the docks, but tides are unpredictable)
Gate of the dead (jump from the cliffs above. The people of the City have an odd sense of humor)
Wanderers gate (the woodland-facing side. They leave a way open)
Flagsnap (old town City. bright flags on the spires and women at the windows)
Waterteeth beach (hideously difficult to land there deliberately, but the tides are such that strange things often wash up. ;Dubbed waterteeth” for the many, many jagged rocks. Sailors say that the only thing ships fear are new moon storms and waterteeth beach.)
Candlelight (the mages way. The shadow cast by candlelight leads into the heart of the City)
Passage of the heights (depending on who you ask, passage by dirigible or zeppelin [both expensive transport], or sneaking into the wealthy side of the City by the rooftops. Criminals also have an odd sense of humor in the City)
Silks gate (main way into the trading quarter of the deep City. so called because of the expensive wares)
Sealed gate (a former passage. Reasons for its removal unknown to the general public)
The mainway (wide, well-guarded kings road into the outskirts of the City. busy at all hours)
Dreams (this needs no elaboration)
Now THAT is a way to theme a story collection. Every story is about the City, even when it isnt. The titles are the gates to the City. the first page is of course a stylised map.
Many travelers toying with the idea of immigrating to the City are concerned when they first hear of the many, many entrances. What of invasion? they always ask. No inhabitant concerns themselves with a prospect as ridiculous as being invaded. The City would not accept such indignity. and the conversation is over. This is of course baffling to prospective immigrants.
Pine sap and snow. Soft crunch of frosted needles underfoot.;
The foothills of the fractal mountain are the kindest lands to wander that I have found in my travels. The people revere the transient and undefined.;
A note, however, for the interested traveler: do not meet with a member of the people when a hawk flies overhead. They cannot trust you in the presence of warning divinity.;
>The monks, They notice the smell of wind and the footsteps left behind after a passing. The shadows left uncast by firelight and the sun that sings behind the horizon. They believe, unaccountably, that an educated one ought to be able to ascertain precisely the provenance of a wanderer by the way they pause between sentences. They have archived the average hue and brightness of every sunrise since the founding of their ministry.;
I sat with a young monk (though it can be exceedingly difficult to tell their ages) once on a cold night. We passed the time, as is the way, in exact vagueness.
This was the night first I learned of the mountain.
We shivered against the wind slipping through the cracks in our sheltering trees. I knew, even then, that the monks of the people are wise in many things. Perhaps I was the fool in asking my questions. Perhaps she was the fool for answering them.
What is cold?
A stillness that infects. The air, if taken in pieces, holds itself close. Movement is life and life is movement. This particulate stillness is infectious and abhorrent to the warmth of your blood. I recommend that you let the feeling wash over your body without resentment. The end of all things will be stiller yet.
What is ending?
Years past I walked along the banks of a dying brook in a dry land. There had not been rain in all the passing and counting of the last seasons moons, as that peoples wise ones told me. The stream remained despite, but it was not enough. I took a small stone worn smooth by the movement of the stream in better days. I proclaimed out to the desert: “All things carry the memory of their existence. This stone remembers the stream.” and I threw the stone with careful force into the creekbed. The muddy water rippled outwards, in silence. The people of this desert did not understand this action. They demanded that I slake their thirst for water and answers. I looked outwards in silence. As I watched, the ripples of the muddy water concerned themselves not with the present boundaries of the stream, but with the past memory of the stream. The ripples brought with them the clean water that flowed in the memories of the desert people. What is ending? It is forgetting, in truth. Nothing can ever be destroyed.
There are no dry lands for many months of hard travel away! I hadnt realised that you monks were a traveling folk.
The earth turns daily. The earth moves around the sun for the seasons. The sun moves with the galaxy in immeasurable ways. When seen like this, arent we all traveling folk?
Why are you… here? This valley?
Now that, my shivering friend, is a simple question. I am here because I was requested.
But she would not tell me who had requested her, or why. I asked around the question until the wind lessened its bite. She told me of names, and candlewax, and the many wonders of spider-silk, but she would not tell me of her purpose in the foothills. I slept uneasily that night. The monk was gone before I woke.
She left a note on my papers:;
“One-who-questions, I have enjoyed my time with you. Go to the mountain. I cannot guarentee that there you will find what you seek.”
I read the note many times without satisfaction. I had been warned by a friend that the monks of the people speak in strange ways, but that knowledge did not help my present struggle. She did not say anything about what I sought, or anything about this mountain. There is no mountain on the horizon. A puzzle, that. I realised that everyone who I spoke to of the people referred to this land as “the foothills”. The foothills… of a mountain?
>The monks of the people garden extensively. They are fond of garlic in their food. No one has ever seen them to lie, though it is known that they are overfond of extravagant stories. They laugh often. They dance well. It is unknown where they come from, how they recruit, why they live in their peculiar ways. The people call them “monks” but they do not speak on the subject of their religion.;
Perhaps I should have asked her about herself rather than cold and candlewax.
I walk with my coat tied around my waist to better enjoy the hint of spring in the air. All traveling folk know to leave before the true warmth of spring, to cover the longest distance before first frost. Knowing that doesnt make last frost any easier.;
The homes of the people are large and brightly-painted. They live with many people to a house, and in my travels so far I have not yet puzzled out what, exactly, makes up the groups in the houses. One of the houses that sheltered me for a night had 15 people in it, all of whom had voices like songbirds. They looked nothing alike.;
Another house (who I will eternally remember) sheltered me in a deep storm. They looked to be sisters. They braided lavender into my hair and praised me for its length. I was sorry to leave that worn and lovely home.
>The monks of the people stubbornly refuse categorization.;
I said once, to a monk with copper hair and bright eyes, that I expected if nothing else, for the sun to rise tomorrow. He watched my eyes for a moment too long.;
Will it? Will it rise tomorrow?;
I asked in rising concern.
He picked up a dandelion nearby, and ate it meditatively.;
Yes. There will be a sunrise.
And he walked away.
Im not certain yet whether I enjoy talking to the monks.
I should clarify a possible misconception on the part of the reader.
;>The monks wear no vestments, nor do they take some vow of poverty that allows one to recognise them on sight. They are known by the intricate markings covering their skin.;
I havent yet gotten a comprehensible answer as to why the tattoos. Such is life.
>The monks of the people map the places where time passes oddly, places that one remembers without having ever seen. It is said that they keep a library with atlases of every graveyard ever forgotten and built over. They discuss the mathematics of rain.
;(As if something like rain could be calculated! Preposterous.);
They share a different name for themselves sometimes when they are asked.
Based on some occult factor that I do not yet know! Its not a different name everytime. Is it what, moon phase? Their current mood? Is it based on events of the day, or the personality of the asker? These people are maddeningly opaque.
To say that they have a final goal would be a misunderstanding at best. Their goal is to *exist*, as deeply as possible. They commit to life.
The monks of the people refuse to enter the City.;
They refuse passage through any of the twelve gates.
They do not speak of the City except in whispers.
They refer to the City as “she”.
This is troubling for reasons that Im not certain of. I havent known the monks to fear anything at all, most surely not a foreign city. Perhaps this is not fear, exactly, but contempt. Or respect.
Her mask is engraved in a delicate swirling pattern of morning glory flowers. Cherry wood, it looks like. You would know better if you were a mask-maker instead of a wanderer.
“Do you know where I can find the Weavers?” she asks
Above you, of course
She must be from a very far country not to know that the Weavers never touch ground from the day of their adoption. Strange folk, but not the strangest youve met. They worship storms as near as you can tell. You tried, once, to ask about their methods of clothmaking and were nearly thrown out of the assembly. These people are unfond of questions.
Wanderers gate:
Goatherd staying through the night with a strangely wounded animal
Birds try to smother her fire. Shes a small and slight girl, and spends the night until sunrise beating songbirds away from a waning fire. She can hear the fluttering of wings in the trees, but her firelight doesnt reach them. Her hands are blistered in the morning. The goat lives.
Birds watch her from the trees.
Raintide Interlude- thoughts on a subway
By sea:
Emerald steamship following the reflection of the moon through the atlantic. On the night of the full moon, one crewmember vanishes, and on the night of the new moon, they reappear for a single night. Charming, talkative, and with a healthy appetite, everything about them is normal for an able seaman, except for their pale eyes. They pretend to have no idea what the crew means when they ask where they went. They tell the captain half the truth, and laugh when he tries to restrain them. They are gone in the morning. The reflection of the moon vanishes, and the ship returns to port.
;Winter Interlude: Young girl (?) walking barefoot through a frozen pine forest cheerfully without any acknowledgement of it being winter and lethally cold
Poetic descriptions ; of icicle music and frosted leaves
She is thinking about a difficult philosophical quandary that she needs to resolve
Silks Gate:
A Weaver is painstakingly copying the stars onto a tapestry, she gathers, spins, dyes, and weaves alone. The weavers do not approve of her project. They consider it foolish and childish, and power-hungry.
;Fall Interlude - the first light-speed ship launches, and reaches the end of the universe
Waterteeth beach:
Shiphand boy trapped in a divingbell-space in a sunken ship at the bottom of the sea. He has a dream that his little air bubble is filling with water, and the rest of the ship is filling with air, so he jumps into the sea of air so that he doesnt drown.
;Spring Interlude: A traveling historian finds a people who catalogue everything that history does not.
Flagsnap:
An old delivery man who fell asleep on the doorstep of a wealthy familys house in the city while waiting for them to open the door for him wakes up in a time loop on the first warm day of spring.;
He very, very gradually realises the implications of this. Every day, he steals the clothes of a wealthy man, walks brazenly into the right houses, reads their libraries, learns from their tutors, eats their fine food. He speaks a dozen languages and has spoken personally to every member of the senate. He can learn a new secret every day, until the Old City beats within his heart. He steals a poor mans clothes, and walks the slums every day. In this way he learns again the ways of his native people. Step by step, he learns every quarter of the city. Every morning, he wakes in a ragged servicers uniform on the doorstep he was left waiting on. In increasingly perfect understanding, he traps the city in amber. The Beloved of the City kills him one morning before he wakes on the doorstep.
The Beloved of the City is a cripped girl covered in burn scars. She is the only one who knows what it plans. (The city chews its secrets to the bone.) She is unknown in her home country, but has some esteem among the slum children for her storytelling. The slum children understand better than they can say what she is, and they tell each other on deep summer nights the truth about her.;
She walked out of the sea, and she sleeps at the top of the Silks Gate fountain.;
She used to be a princess but her father tried to kill her!
I think shes a bird that turned into a human. Ask her to eat an egg and ill prove it.
;she only looks like a kid, they threw her out of the wizard college because she figured out how to live forever. Like a skeleton!
She could stop a sword with her face!
;shes the one who killed the king;
shes the one who closed the Sealed Gate
Shes a mob boss! I just know it!
and once, just once, from a quiet orphan who saw behind peoples faces:;
She sleeps under the city.
The quiet orphan said it, and he remembered the way the stones beneath them;the childrens conversation. He died 8 years later of fever.
The Beloved of the City has never died.
Merchants Bridge:
The merchants bridge is slightly misnamed. It isnt just for merchants, and it isnt just a bridge. The entire wide square past the bridgeway is filled with stands and hawkers, true, but it is also filled with buskers and children and beggars. There are occasionally palanquins, but they mostly keep their filth to Silks Gate. in the corners and alleyways there are stranger wares. In the quiet places past closed doors, of names unfamous (or infamous), there are the strangest wares. I recommend (if you are a discerning buyer) that you ask after the Reverend Lady Mallowrue. Be careful who you ask. Be more careful still what you purchase.
The bridge itself is banned from commerce. No buying or selling is permitted to occur. Some wretched souls at all hours will beg above the water for passerbys to take (for free!) some item from ther possession. This is permitted by city officials, so long as they do not give passerbys anything to bribe them to take whatever awful thing it is from the poor souls hands. A popular saying in the City, always told to new residents is thus: the merchants of the bridge sell nothing, and nothingness is what you will recieve. In this way telling a dubiously legitimate merchant that they sell nothing is a deeply rude way of implying that their wares are cursed.
Gate of the Dead:
A scholar is convinced that walking a specific path through the city gates will reveal esoteric knowledge. Ey is entirely correct. The trouble is, as ey walk through each of the gates in turn, ey slowly begins to understand that the path ey follows cannot be stopped partway through: which includes the gate of the dead. Ey is taken through coincidences, bad decisions, and pure misfortune through each gate in turn:;
The merchants bridge (goblin market)
By sea (the docks, but tides are unpredictable)
Wanderers gate (the woodland-facing side. They leave a way open)
Flagsnap (old town City. bright flags on the spires and women at the windows)
The canal (shipments from the interior)
Passage of the heights (depending on who you ask, passage by dirigible or zeppelin [both expensive transport], or sneaking into the wealthy side of the City by the rooftops. Criminals also have an odd sense of humor in the City) (the heights contain most CIty food gardens)
Silks gate (main way into the trading quarter of the deep City. so called because of the expensive wares)
The mainway (wide, well-guarded kings road into the outskirts of the City. busy at all hours)
Candlelight (the mages way. The shadow cast by candlelight leads into the heart of the City)
Dreams (this needs no elaboration)
Gate of the dead (jump from the cliffs above. The people of the City have an odd sense of humor)
Sealed gate (a former passage. Reasons for its removal unknown to the general public)
Until all that remains are the sealed gate and the gate of the dead
Eir only solace is that the sealed gate remains sealed. Surely the gate of the dead is the last in sequence. Ey is tormented by nightmares of endless city streets, lost among towers and cathedrals and boulevards of increasing sublimity. Ey decides to leave the city, and quickly learns that ey cannot go through any gate that ey have gone through before in the ritual. Ey loses eir academic standing, eir friends, eir status. As a mendicant on the city streets ey live for the next decade, eternally in fear of eir own death. Ey realises: the city is patient. If ey is to live eir days in the City, ey chooses to;hrive.;Ey works in the kitchens and streets of the City slums, using eir academic education to study medicine. Ey becomes a beloved elder of the poor streets. Ey finds love and companionship that ey never knew before eir curse, as ey call it. One day ey sees a desperate man that ey remembers from the kitchens climbing the slopes of the Gate of the Dead. Ey runs on arthritic legs to reach him, just barely as he reaches the peak. Ey cannot quite talk him off the ledge, and when he moves to jump, ey grabs on. Falling.
The gate of the dead is not the final gate in the sequence.
Once begun, the rital cannot be ceased. The former academic enters the Sealed Gate.
Factions of the City:
Academics
Silks gate traders (bitter rivals/ private trading partners of the Merchants bridge traders)
Merchants bridge traders (bitter rivals/ private trading partners of the Silks gate traders)
Flagsnap district (contains parliament. They understand the value of secrets)
Servicers (the streetlight-keepers, deliverymen, post carriers, and sweepers. They keep their own company)
Street children
Assorted artisans (disorganised. They have common interests, and sometimes organise in pursuit of a specific goal)
The weavers;
The monks (external. They do not enter the City)
Sailors
Fishermen (overlap with the sailors for the most part, but the seastone fishermen of Waterteeth beach never go on the water. Folklore has it that the sea hates them.)
Dirigible transport (expensive, but they keep good tabs on upper-class movement in the City)
Candle-mages (the only proper form of magic, though the young ones believe that the Weavers know their own kinds)
Whoever is behind The Dreams (everyone has the dreams, every new moon night. Some people have taken to not sleeping that night to avoid them. Most forms of employment are understanding about exhaustion after a new moon. Everyone experiences them in slightly different ways. Empires by the sea being slowly flooded over the course of what feels like centuries of total silence and dust. Being pursued by hawks through impossibly deep old growth forest. Dry wells lit with candles.
These, of course, represent the powers other than the city
The moon is allied and protects the Cityfolk when she can
The sea hates the City and wishes it destroyed
The trikaaricheraa want to call the City to account for its history
Not even the candle-mages know who the wells and candles belong to (its the monks! Or something allied with them)
Lady Mallowrue (can get anything for the right price. The right price as decided by her, at least. Rumor has it that she holds more strings in Flagsnap Commons than the Parliament likes to think about. Quieter rumor has it that she is a fiction, an imaginary figurehead for the criminal element. The quietest rumor holds that she died a long time ago and refused to be buried.)
The muralist school (disorganised. They publically dislike the architects guild, but rumor has it that their membership significantly overlaps. Philosophically they are in favor of an organically planned City. much quieter rumor has it that the City approves)
The Beloved of the City (she is a faction unto herself)
The baths (only civilised place to talk for much of society. No taboo of public nudity in the bathhouses)
The canaleers (best way to travel quickly along specific routes)
Mainway guards
Gardeners of the heights (the City supplies most of its own food, rooftops are built mostly flat)
The architects guild (rather cultish. Damn near impossible to join. Invitation only)
Notes of Cityfolk ethics:
Slavery is publically disapproved of, as is overharsh debt collection. Everyone knows however that some public figures hold their debtors very close indeed.
Folklore talks about ragged old women knowing secrets and being deserving of help often. The elderly are respected in the City, but not usually found in positions of public relations.
Nature is preserved passionately. An outside observer might consider it to be religiously inclined. The Cityfolk do not. If you ask the right person at the right time, they can tell you stories about blackened skies and burning rivers that their grandmother told them, for the City wasnt always so pleasant to live in. they consider it to be a form of civic duty and ancestor reverence. If you ask a very, very short list of people on quiet nights on the rooftops of Flagsnap District (widely believed to be the best place to talk), they can tell you a strange tale of every production building in the City collapsing into dust overnight. The Parliament disapproves of such idle talk.
The merchants bridge (goblin market)
By sea (the docks, but tides are unpredictable)
Gate of the dead (jump from the cliffs above. The people of the City have an odd sense of humor)
Wanderers gate (the woodland-facing side. They leave a way open)
Flagsnap (old town City. bright flags on the spires and women at the windows)
Waterteeth beach (hideously difficult to land there deliberately, but the tides are such that strange things often wash up. ;Dubbed waterteeth” for the many, many jagged rocks. Sailors say that the only thing ships fear are new moon storms and waterteeth beach.)
Candlelight (the mages way. The shadow cast by candlelight leads into the heart of the City)
Passage of the heights (depending on who you ask, passage by dirigible or zeppelin [both expensive transport], or sneaking into the wealthy side of the City by the rooftops. Criminals also have an odd sense of humor in the City)
Silks gate (main way into the trading quarter of the deep City. so called because of the expensive wares)
Sealed gate (a former passage. Reasons for its removal unknown to the general public)
The mainway (wide, well-guarded kings road into the outskirts of the City. busy at all hours)
Dreams (this needs no elaboration)
SCP: the antique ladys hand mirror that reflects light slower back