The cinders of industry! The fires of the forges, of kilns, of bakeries, the char of meat! The rising stinking smoke! The lowing of auroch, of glyptodon, their great piled turds! The calls of the merchant! The tolling bells! Homes, taverns, shrines, storefronts, towers, libraries, gardens, the grand walls, the amphitheatres, the brothels, the temples, the manteions, the guildhouses, the workshops! The dancing, singing, heaving crowds! No place else beneath the vault of heaven, no other moment since the rebirth of the world is as dense with Life, with Thought, with sublime Humanity as this place, at this moment. The First City! Wreathed in sacred gold, blessed by Zoss, by Typhon, by Dendra, by the small gods in their swarming millions, by every beat of every dreaming heart! It is Paradise Zygotic! It is the cradle of God Remade! Here, above the billowing dust of hopeless eons, above the red-toothed world, rise the walls of Eld Abrathat, and upon the starmetal transoms of its seven yawning gates a promise blazes:
"HOMO SACRA RES HOMINI"
THE FOLK compose a shifting morass, architects and inhabitants of this human hive. Native agrarians and barbarous hunter-gatherer converts share the streets, often choosing to revert, to brave the wastes beyond the river, the smilodons, the machine hordes, the windborne Agony, rather than submit to the adamant law of the City. Any who are free and who stay and bow before the lapis gates are allochthon, permitted to toil, to earn the City's coinage, to trade and barter, to enjoy the protection of its walls but not to own property within them. This is a privilege reserved only for those who, by blood or marriage, or, failing these, by military service, call themselves exultant: A descendant (actually or symbolically) of one of the original villagers who bore witness to Barathrum's glory.
They are Civilized. Humanist. They have seen (and some have lived) the lives of unbound men in nature, the threads of fate which spasm round the Stateless, their desperate landless clans and the violence done to them by pure chance. They know that once all humanity was united and synonymous with God the Monad and that the fractionization of their species must be reversed in order to restore paradise. The City is a step towards fulfilling that teleology, and a holy struggle. The Abrethans are safe, at least from without, except when the plagues come, and they are fed, except when the rains fill not the sacred headwaters, but most of all they are united, a single superorganism in constant flux.
The problem is the same as it always has been: In the absence of God, men must govern men. The Heavenly Choir sings but seldomly and the tempering of humankind requires they find their own way - and it so happens that some acquire much, and some must live with little, and the universal harmony of their Edenic past is found only fleetingly within the City walls, passing like a spirit amidst suffocating inequality. But it is found. Before the lapis gates of the Palace, among the pale ziggurats like clean cut salt in sunshine, the bronze musculata and khopesh of the royal guard flashing, symbols of authority, of subjugation - among these it is paradoxically found, in the midst of drunken song, on feast days, in the synchronized beating of oars against old Yonth - a glorious unity of purpose. This is the real treasure of Eld Abrathat.
THE DOCKS, the kufars and coracles, the men the sweat the sounds, the bells ding-ding, workmen's shouts, lapping Yonth, the creak and bonk of boats; haul in the catch flopping fresh, rushed to the monger, a smell that blasts the mind, a life-altering smell. The very oldest of all for Abreth was always by the river and from it draws its life, its wealth, the essence of its civilization. The docks a nearly sacred place, its bulging noble attendants nearly holy men, proud they are and rightly so for they heave the City 'pon their muscled backs.
Follow Yonth down the web of irrigating life-granting canals like capillaries, the gates and locks, out to fields of endless aureate maize, orchard labyrinths, jammy-scented halls with ceilings of drooping gravid boughs. Praise Dendra! A verdant web in the midst of rust-red desert like a pair of splayed hands bejewelled with emeralds.
The thundering floods in spring and autumn, thick-brown like gravy, rich with alluvium - SEE the sweltering thousands laboring in the fields, the system of sluices, basins, dikes, and shadoof with which they capture Yonth and imbue the soil with its torrential vim. The maize taller than a man, the manioc, the squash, the tendril beanstalks spiral-growing before your eyes - the squadrons of lumbering brontotheres and river barges hauling gigantic loads of kernels to the warehouse, or to the vast nixtamalization cauldrons for soaking. The City eats. All that arrives from upriver is hoarded, transmuted, penultimately gobbled, ultimately shitted out, ejected downriver, molecular fuel for the Iksan industrial pharmakeia and eventually for the algal minds of the Acidalian.
THE WALLS, regolithic, monolithic, the striated eons of their slow formation plain upon their face. Forty-nine cubits thick in honor of the seven members of the celestial choir, in some places arcing so gently as to appear straight, in others angled and mazed according to ineffable design, mystic and mandalic. They were pulled from the very ground by Aumun Barathrum upon his return to Abreth and encompassed an area kilometers wider than the village's contemporary limits; a manifest destiny and founding. Now, of course, the City pools and bursts beyond their bounds.
Approach them. Upon the City-facing surface is graven exquisitely the stories of it's people, their trials and triumphs, a wall of teeming history intaglio. Each heroic figure, scene of military victory, of plague and famine, of divine manifestation all resolve as you draw nearer into a boggling calligraphic cavalcade, each line and chisel-mark in truth a glyph, a river of narrative twice-told. The first official act of each king as he assumes the throne is the commission of a corps of royal sculptors. In this way the sovereign fulfills his duty as guardian of his people's past, as the Akhet augurs attend to their future.
Symbolically, it is believed that this inward-facing monument of such concentrated human genius acts upon the City as a sort of psychic neutron reflector.
THE FAITH of the City is luminous and palpable. It's precepts we have already spoken of. The majority are Akhetites, horizon-strugglers, but inevitably the constant trickle of allochthon immigrants bring with them their own clannish faiths: Ancestor worshipers, ghost-talkers, dissociative ultra-animists, mechanist iconodules, a dizzying variety of beliefs although in truth most of these depend upon a deep intergenerational connection to a sacred homeland or place of power which in emigrating are by necessity abandoned, and which can only rarely withstand the vast psychic pressure of the City for long enough to establish a self-perpetuating community.
Temple pylons mark the winding streets like a lighthouse-dotted coast. Sunstone manteions, their listening-cups upturned towards the cosmic procession of the Choir, from which the augurs prophesy, act as schools and meeting-places. Here the horologium is recited and the stars are tracked, and here is where beasts are brought to the altar, slain and carved, the entrails read, the head burned within a skymetal brazier and allowed to rise to heaven in tribute, the meat roasted and distributed among the flock. Here too the throbbing aedicula and their panes of obsidian glass. Through these the Choir sometimes (so very rarely) sings; knowledge of their ineffable mechanisms and the lore of their maintenance (if not their construction) is kept alive by these Abrethan augurs and perhaps the Iksans, and perhaps by no one else in all the world.
Tower-shrines to specific gods form a fanged skyline, the grandest to Zoss, divine father-king, who blessed Barathrum with incantatory formulas. Of these the grandest of all was once Magantha Zoss, stolen from its foundations by bats in the time of the fathers, the eldest and most ensorcelled of the clergy stolen along with it; a vacuum of power which the Lapis Throne sought at once to fill. Now the center of the faith lies behind the palace walls, rather than as counterpoint beyond them. There has been friction. For four hundred years the line of succession has remained miraculously unbroken, due in large part to the augurs and their dim window into the future; Aumun Inanna now wields Barathrum's wand and sword, and contends with power and danger unknown to her predecessors.
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