The Cities

Art by Jeff Brown

I haven't been as active as I would like recently, though not for a lack of ideas (I've got them, I swear: there's a medusa who's kept asleep and sedated by the milky venom that drips from the fangs of her serpentine hair and everything!) but rather because I had to have 4 spinal taps and the resulting headache requires me to lay completely flat on my back and has made doing anything very irritating. In any case, I've managed to throw a table together: surprise, it's weird and rather prosaic (I bet you weren't surprised at all, were you, punk) but hopefully you get a kick out of it and take it as a token that I'm still trying to be productive. 

d8 Cities: How Did They Fall?

1
The city fell not once, but a hundred times. Many centuries worth of triumphant architectural innovation crushing the inferior barbarian structures, over, and over, and over. Finally, when the spears and guns of the newest tyrant’s forces were visible over the hills, the people of the city left. Unwilling to be the next in the cycle of subjugation. When the army arrived, the city was abandoned. No masses to rule. The funds to pay the soldiers diminished, and soon, they left too. Today, the valley below the Tyrant’s city is cheerful and prosperous. Good farming folk, fine animals, an abundance of drink. Within the cities walls, the tyrant walks down overgrown thoroughfares. An old man, alone but for the ghosts of the dead kings before him. What a pity, they say. What a pity. And we had such dreams. In the valley the folk say What an ugly ruin and children peer through the cracks in the wall to leave food for the old beggar who lives there.
2
The city didn’t fall, it fractalized. A doppelganger of the King constructed a palace, almost identical to the first, within the city walls. His wife was as fearsome and glorious as the queen, if not more so.  At first, civil war. The soldiers slew men with their nose, their eyes. Mothers mourned their warrior daughters, patriotic and slain, only to meet them, captured as prisoners of war from the opposing side. The war dragged on, life resumed in the thick of it. Gradually, a crisis of loyalty. People forgot which edicts to uphold. Attended the wrong coronations. Not that they could tell the difference. When two more Kings appeared, people wondered and worried, but when the 4 identical Kings became 8, and then 16, everyone gave up and took to ignoring the monarchy (monarchies, now) altogether. Palaces proliferated. Space became limited. Now every other yard is the courtyard of a miniature castle. People swear fealty to one court on Sundays and another Monday through Friday. Nobody can tell the difference. Armies have become so divided a King is lucky to have one man, and a part timer at that.  The city is wealthy: how could it not be, all those fountains and tiny golden minarets. But terribly confused.
3
The city grew with its king, and so fell with its king. At his birth, it was a hamlet, but as he grew the streets stretched out and buildings folded up out of themselves, people walked out of their doors and through other ones as though they’d lived there their entire lives, which perhaps they had. For twenty years, the King and his city enjoyed their prime together, but as his back ached, the streets buckled, as his eyes grew dim the streetlamps sputtered and faded away. When he was bent crooked, it seemed impossible that the towers had ever caught clouds on their peaks. The people began to leave, the houses to sag. When, at last, he died, only one man remained to bury him, and as he placed the final shovelful of soil on the grave, with a groaning shudder, the last plank of the last house in town gave out.
4
The city has not fallen, though none can live there. It stretches, glorious and steel-bright above the wooded hills that surround it, its smallest towers hundreds of feet above the grandest palaces. You can hear it from miles away, a constant roar and grind of machinery and wheels, screeching brakes and honking horns. It was not always this way. When it began, it was a city of stone and clay and wood like all the others. But its people saw more in it, conjured majesty in their minds, gave to it their bodies and souls to make it rise. It took their offerings, and rise it did. Too late did its people realize the extent of their bargain. As the factories increased production, the people of the city grew thinner and weaker, as the walls of houses went from clay to wood to stone to brick to concrete to glass, their minds grew feebler. Now, the city has perfected itself, and its machines carry its skeletal citizens to and from their jobs with all tenderness.
5
The city fell as it spread out from its center, the streets unfurling like black ferns, spreading heavy tendrils across the world, buildings borne along with it, neighborhoods expanding away from themselves in all directions until it was impossible to tell that there had been a city at all. In every town, and sometimes in stranger places, forests and mountains, one can find the city’s houses. The people who dwell within them are gracious. They are glad you have come. They will talk to you of their city. They are patriotic. They are proud to be a part of the largest city in the world, stretching through desert and vale, from the ocean floor to the rainforest.
6
The city is sinking, each year, a floor at a time. The tenants must all move upstairs, the merchants convert their apartments into storefronts and lug their couches up to the second floor. Construction is continual, the buildings never finished, always growing taller to replace their missing height. When the city falls, as it surely will, it will leave only pits where once were homes and halls, extending down to roofs, and eventually, thousands upon thousands of floors, vertical records of the times and who lived in them.
7
The city fell long ago, though you wouldn’t know it. A single creature, alien, but hidden, concealed as mundane things: a chair, a shoe, a door. Waiting for its moment, striking, devouring, breeding. Its kin took the places of the things they ate, whole houses becomes structures of concealed, lurking flesh. Then streets. Finally, they perfected people, able to regurgitate memories well enough to mold their flesh into similar likenesses. Finally there was no one left. No one suspects. Trade carries on. Shipments full of textiles are carried overseas, each fold of cloth a creature, hungry and secret.
8
The Roc took the city, great talons wrenching it from the earth, foundations, sewer system, all tangled and dangling in the air like some wretched jellyfish, scattering tiny lives as the bird flew. Across the plains its wings flooded darkness, until at last, it reached the peak, only a grey stone from the birds great height. Its grip loosened, the city plummeted, splitting itself on the peak, rubble avalanching, stained glass windows bursting across the snow, books spilling down ravines. The bird landed, picked through the wreckage. Found what it was looking for, the tiny, living heart of the city. Saw it throbbing beneath a fallen schoolhouse. Plucked it out with its enormous beak. Swallowed it, slept.

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