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    There is always a city.

    It is one of the great inevitabilities of creation, like ‘there’s never a bus when you need one’ or ‘you all meet in an inn;’ certain things happen over and over again, in accordance with (multi)universal laws considerably more fundamental than mere gravity. [1]

    The city’s name and location changes scripturally. Ur begat Akkad. Akkad begat Nineveh. Nineveh begat Persepolis and so on. Sometimes the begating is more a rebranding. Rome begat Nova Roma. Nova Roma rebranded as Constantinople and then had its people-centric wordspace synergistically reimagined as Istanbul. Sometimes the drift can be more substantial in terms of distance. Paris begat London which begat New York; indeed London was particularly promiscuous, it’s smoky loins begating not just New York but also Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, and so-forth and so-on.

    All these examples come from a single place, an unremarkable world whose sole defining characteristics are, firstly, that it is ‘just right’ for the development of intelligent life [2], and, secondly that the bears haven’t come back to find out what the hell we have done with all their porridge.

    Yet.

    However, metaphorical yet hungry conceptual cosmic ursine eschatology and the doom of man aside, this law broadly holds across all space and time. There is always a city, at the centre of everything. [3] This city straddles two continents. And it has been at the centre of everything for a very, very long time. [4] Zeiggard, the City of Monsters, has been around since forever. Its ancient vaults of black basalt and queer, greenish soapstone predate mere humanity by at least a million years. It is believed to have existed ever since the Outland broke away from the main body of the Heartland and drifted northwards [5], eventually colliding with the roof of the world and forming the transcontinental strait known, fittingly, as the Strife.

    This particular variety of city turns up quite a lot as well. Normally it can be found in the fever dreams of dying conquistadors discovering that the quite spectacular biological diversity of the Amazon rainforest extends all the way down to the microbial level; or else it turns up in the thirst-induced delirium of someone wandering in the desert for too long, the city hiding in the horizon-shimmer like someone in a swimming pool changing room whose towel has been stolen when they were in the shower; in recent years, the city’s favoured location has been a frozen wasteland at the bottom of the world, or on some distant celestial body, or an abyssal trench at the bottom of the sea.

    Wherever it can be found there are slimy vaults and memories of aeon-dead elder nightmares, slumbering until the time comes to raven horribly all over the place. One can normally be assured that its inhabitants were squamous. [6] Or possibly bachtrachian. [7] Maybe even tentacular. [8] But why are the elder nightmares aeon-dead? [9] Why is there probably nothing but slime in the vaults? [10] Is it because the Stars are Not Right? Were everyone’s minds eaten by otherworldly monstrosities? [11] Or did the Old Ones find themselves priced out by gentrification and simply moved to somewhere else where the cost of unliving was cheaper? Why is the city inevitably almost completely empty, aside from the occasional protoplasmic horror or face-hugging parasitoid? These are in very important questions; however in this particular example, the question is why none of them apply. For in this very singular respect, Zeiggard is basically unique in the countless billions of teeming and bickering realities. It is the nightmare corpse-city that…isn’t.

Instead, it is very much alive. [12]

[1] Which is actually much less important than Strong Nuclear Force, Magnetism, and Sod’s Law.

[2] ‘Intelligent’ said here with a certain generosity of spirit.

[3] Definitions of ‘everything’ are surprisingly varied across reality and unreality alike. Depending on one’s viewpoint, ‘everything’ can actually be remarkably little.

[4] Although it is located over a thousand miles from the Axis Mundi. Literalism is for mere geography.

[5] Opinion is divided on why this is; prevailing theories include magma currents, magnets (somehow), or divine wrath. All the Elves and Dwarves will say about it is that they are sure that they know what went wrong.

[6] Which means ‘scaly’ rather than ‘squiggly,’ which clearly makes no sense whatsoever.

[7] Which, utterly infuriatingly, means ‘toad-like’ rather than ‘rather like a camel,’ which obviously would be much more sensible.

[8] Which actually, in a shocking display of linguistic common sense, actually is the adjective for exactly what it sounds like.

[9] Even if they are still dreaming.

[10] Which may still be sentient and/or hungry but which isn’t likely to do much more than eat the occasional idiot/archaeologist.

[11] We can at least be sure that this didn’t happen with Zeiggard, if only because none of its inhabitants have yet discovered social media.

[12] For a given value of ‘alive’, anyway. Undead play merry hell with metaphor.

Description

    There is always a city.

    It is one of the great inevitabilities of creation, like ‘there’s never a bus when you need one’ or ‘you all meet in an inn;’ certain things happen over and over again, in accordance with (multi)universal laws considerably more fundamental than mere gravity. [1]

    The city’s name and location changes scripturally. Ur begat Akkad. Akkad begat Nineveh. Nineveh begat Persepolis and so on. Sometimes the begating is more a rebranding. Rome begat Nova Roma. Nova Roma rebranded as Constantinople and then had its people-centric wordspace synergistically reimagined as Istanbul. Sometimes the drift can be more substantial in terms of distance. Paris begat London which begat New York; indeed London was particularly promiscuous, it’s smoky loins begating not just New York but also Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, and so-forth and so-on.

    All these examples come from a single place, an unremarkable world whose sole defining characteristics are, firstly, that it is ‘just right’ for the development of intelligent life [2], and, secondly that the bears haven’t come back to find out what the hell we have done with all their porridge.

    Yet.

    However, metaphorical yet hungry conceptual cosmic ursine eschatology and the doom of man aside, this law broadly holds across all space and time. There is always a city, at the centre of everything. [3] This city straddles two continents. And it has been at the centre of everything for a very, very long time. [4] Zeiggard, the City of Monsters, has been around since forever. Its ancient vaults of black basalt and queer, greenish soapstone predate mere humanity by at least a million years. It is believed to have existed ever since the Outland broke away from the main body of the Heartland and drifted northwards [5], eventually colliding with the roof of the world and forming the transcontinental strait known, fittingly, as the Strife.

    This particular variety of city turns up quite a lot as well. Normally it can be found in the fever dreams of dying conquistadors discovering that the quite spectacular biological diversity of the Amazon rainforest extends all the way down to the microbial level; or else it turns up in the thirst-induced delirium of someone wandering in the desert for too long, the city hiding in the horizon-shimmer like someone in a swimming pool changing room whose towel has been stolen when they were in the shower; in recent years, the city’s favoured location has been a frozen wasteland at the bottom of the world, or on some distant celestial body, or an abyssal trench at the bottom of the sea.

    Wherever it can be found there are slimy vaults and memories of aeon-dead elder nightmares, slumbering until the time comes to raven horribly all over the place. One can normally be assured that its inhabitants were squamous. [6] Or possibly bachtrachian. [7] Maybe even tentacular. [8] But why are the elder nightmares aeon-dead? [9] Why is there probably nothing but slime in the vaults? [10] Is it because the Stars are Not Right? Were everyone’s minds eaten by otherworldly monstrosities? [11] Or did the Old Ones find themselves priced out by gentrification and simply moved to somewhere else where the cost of unliving was cheaper? Why is the city inevitably almost completely empty, aside from the occasional protoplasmic horror or face-hugging parasitoid? These are in very important questions; however in this particular example, the question is why none of them apply. For in this very singular respect, Zeiggard is basically unique in the countless billions of teeming and bickering realities. It is the nightmare corpse-city that…isn’t.

Instead, it is very much alive. [12]

[1] Which is actually much less important than Strong Nuclear Force, Magnetism, and Sod’s Law.

[2] ‘Intelligent’ said here with a certain generosity of spirit.

[3] Definitions of ‘everything’ are surprisingly varied across reality and unreality alike. Depending on one’s viewpoint, ‘everything’ can actually be remarkably little.

[4] Although it is located over a thousand miles from the Axis Mundi. Literalism is for mere geography.

[5] Opinion is divided on why this is; prevailing theories include magma currents, magnets (somehow), or divine wrath. All the Elves and Dwarves will say about it is that they are sure that they know what went wrong.

[6] Which means ‘scaly’ rather than ‘squiggly,’ which clearly makes no sense whatsoever.

[7] Which, utterly infuriatingly, means ‘toad-like’ rather than ‘rather like a camel,’ which obviously would be much more sensible.

[8] Which actually, in a shocking display of linguistic common sense, actually is the adjective for exactly what it sounds like.

[9] Even if they are still dreaming.

[10] Which may still be sentient and/or hungry but which isn’t likely to do much more than eat the occasional idiot/archaeologist.

[11] We can at least be sure that this didn’t happen with Zeiggard, if only because none of its inhabitants have yet discovered social media.

[12] For a given value of ‘alive’, anyway. Undead play merry hell with metaphor.