Heart of the City

In the time of our grandfather's grandfathers, a time few remember still, child–

            :What?: The boy said, snidely. :No one can be that ancient, Grandfather. And I’m not a-:

            :Silence, boy: Grandfather frowned darkly, and a glint of wrath entered his eyes briefly which the boy had never witnessed.  :This is a true story of long ago, and I will not have your insolence tonight: The boy hushed as his grandfather began once more.

            Many summers ago, in the land of our forebears, a beautiful city overlooked Parrin Pass, on the Harmonah waterfall ridge, the most beautiful city this world has known. Before the death of the river, a great waterfall tumbled over the precipice on which the town was built, and the mighty Harmonah river split the city.  It was a city of magic, the pinnacle of all the ages.

            Every structure was built not of stone, nor even of regal cedar, but of glimmer-strands, the light magic lost aeons ago.  Bridges spanning the river and its eddies through the town were as the roots of rainbows, twisting and spinning across the waters in a dazzling display.  Homes were opalescent and veined in many colors, colors not even remembered. They were lovers of fountains, the dwellers of that town. River sprites and water kami dwelt in font-shrines across every square, and man-high trees with silver-veined leaves that smelled of cedar and cherrywood, pine and sugar maple and whose colors reflected everything nearby like tiny mirrors.

            The homes were open and cheery, and you could part the wall-colors to enter any home you liked if you knew the way. Around the city, a wall of colors flowed with rivers of every color swimming in chaotic swirls. When you walked through that wall into the city, it felt as if you were being split into a thousand colors and spit out into a new dimensionality of beauty. The entire city smelled of roses and violets, apples and first-rain, hints of flowers and a heady smell that overwhelmed even the most stalwart of travelers, turning them slightly tipsy.

            As the river tumbled over the precipice over Parrin Pass, the river prismed into countless tiny snakes of color, spinning in a helical aura as the waterfall poured into the crystal waters below. Travelers approaching the pass often watched for hours -until near sunset when the pass was no longer safe - hurrying between the mountains before nightfall.

            From miles away, even before the city’s glowing ambience illuminated the sky and mountainsides, an eastward breeze might waft the scents of the city and lighten the loads of the weary. Smells of rosewood and plums, sandalwood and pine, incense, myrrh, and eucalyptus, sweet lemon and cranberries wash across the coastal mountains into the valleys and hills on the other side. Even the barest hint of its aroma is enough that many a strong man broke down into joyous sobs at a whiff.

            But to describe the city itself? Ah, it is impossible! The dazzling display of nacreous streets, iridescent walkways, and the light-weave boats that float idly down the Harmonah like bobbing, circular lanterns; the ever-shifting structures striated in resplendence, sometimes miming the architectures of the cultures: pagodas, pyramidal ziggurats, colossal cathedrals of color, or just simple yurts, while other times, the city’s structures mimicked nothing culturally recognizable: swirling minarets with a smoky-pearl aura; gold-obsidian towers coated in clouds of silver; floating cerulean spheres; a tropical forest, where lampposts shimmered and waved like trees or undersea kelp, and the houses appeared as coral in a bizarre, alien reef; or, manses like in the southern kingdoms, with yards of pristine greens, silver-leafed hedges, fonts and glimmering limestone streets.

            In the night, ah, what a sight! The stars are magnified, as though brought nearer, gazing with a greater intensity into the city – and none shy away from sight. The moon is always broad and round, and of the brightest golden yellow. The Harmonah carries its own stars as the river fills with the half-spherical boats made of light, forming almost a complete walkway across the water of bobbing boats, and the fae flit across the surface of the waters.  A dullness of light affects the outer buildings, leaving the central heart as a beacon of fiery energy.

            A delicate resinous smell with a hint of citrus and lavender wafts across the waters, and incense is burnt in tiny lanterns hung on lines over the river. A dance begins, though who starts it each night, none can say, and a sweet music as of a harp, or a flute, or a melancholic violin orchestrates the wind and the slowest of dreams drapes over the living. Sometimes, on the darkest of nights where storms rage outside the walls and the rumors of war break through even these stolid walls, a thin, vibrant falsetto floats across the city. The music briefly pauses and every movement ceases, as every ear strains to catch the words, though even those who understand the pensive and plaintive words remember them not in the morning, only as a distant wisp of a dream.

            Whatever shape and style the city, they say that from the tallest mountains looking down, the city always has a heart at its center, vibrant and pulsing with life, and the roads and canals are its arteries, carrying the lifeblood throughout the city. The heart’s shape and hues transform, also, but it remains the city centerpiece, in form and function. And this heart, the ventricles of town, was where the Avov stayed, the creator-creatures of Zevah Nuahr, city of liquid color.

              If Zevah Nuahr’s resplendence was unmatched, its people were more so, carved from a different plane of existence. The first time anyone saw a Rhuach, it almost overwhelmed the senses. They contained a presence that tore apart the senses: smelling of nearly cloying sweetness, as of honey and wine; they appeared as ghostly figures of spinning colors, spirits of spiraling threads and a copper fire that billowed behind each color, giving substance to a plasma ghost: bipedal, lean, tall. You almost believed you could pass through them, and it might be akin to walking through the prismatic wall, a spiritual passing. Stranger yet were the other feelings assaulting your senses in the presence of a Rhuach: a taste of cloves and cinnamon; a tingling sensation as of arrows of cool wind passing across your skin, fletched with a fine mist; the sounds of a keening voice, high of pitch and ever somber. Those who spoke of it after always described its being a lament of unbearable loss, but one borne mightily.