(no subject)
Characters: Ilyigan (favorthebold) solo log
Date/Time: May 24th to June 10th.
Location: The Fourth Floor
Rating: Up to PG-13 for dead people and unpleasantness.
Summary: Kindly fishbowl tree sends Ilyigan to the Fourth Floor, to the city he was born in.
Ilyigan left his journal on the floor of the elevator. He'd written a farewell message of sorts: it had stopped interesting him the moment that the door opened and he was free again. The elevator door has deposited him outside a watchtower along a low wall of stone, and when he looked past the battlements he saw across a city.
His first thought was that the city was beautiful. A moment later, he was not sure why he had thought that: the city was, more than anything, war-wounded. Smoke rose in high pillars from half a dozen places, and even up on the battlement he could breath a lungful of the stench of human rot. It was not beauty, exactly, that had tugged at him in this city of arches and canals, of curling streets and fountains. It was..
His heart ached at the very center of his chest, a tender pain, like seeing a dead lover's portrait.
He walked along the cobblestone path on top of the city wall: seeing as far as the river mouth, where the largest of the fires burned, probably consuming the docks and warehouses. Up from there, he traced the fat, lazy river, blue and brown, and the looted mansions that crumbled into it bit by bit. Some of them showed banners, but he could not read them nor recognize the heraldry, and thought that he didn't care either way. Beyond those marble giants, growing closer and snug together as one looked deeper into the neighborhoods, the houses were brick and stone and close to the earth. Fierce green climbers and small gardens grew wild everywhere. It was nothing like the clean order of Edensphere. But it was a lot more like him.
Where am I?
Slowly, forgetting the elevator for the moment, he walked down from the battlements and spent the first day walking the river, staring into the broken windows of the mansions and leaping canals where bridges had been smashed. Many of the houses had the echoes of splendor: marble statues, great painted ceilings, chandeliers. But little that was bright or pricey remained intact. Some mansions were yet sealed and barred, and if anyone lived within, he could not resent them not coming out to greet a guest.
And there were bodies, of course. Here and there, on stairways, strewn face-down in pools and canals. floating on the river all bloated and gray-green. They were of every age, sex and manner and their dead eyes were all alike where they still had eyes.
That night he ate olives and citrus fruit from some garden with a broken wall and that had to do. He knew better than to drink from the canals or the river. He slept in a looted house and was woken every hour by distant gunfire.
The next day he wandered deeper in, choosing a canal and following it until it ran across another. Bit by bit, he charted a path into the smaller quarters. He was in no hurry - he stopped to look at everything. Hidden vineyards tucked behind houses, twisting iron work on gates and fences, faint grooves that showed where carts would list in a sharp turn. Businesses, too, not only homes - bakeries, wineries, a butcher's shop, a shoemaker's. Some ransacked, all closed.
And the glass shops.
He ran across the first one on the third day and spent more than an hour staring into its smashed window. Very few of the delicate treasures within had remained intact, but enough to make his breath catch in recognition of the style. The tiny beads of glass, like seeds or miniature flowers, stuck together and crafted into full shapes from medallions to vases. Blue, red, green, he knew them all. He looked down at his hands and imagined holding a different kind of steel altogether - it felt like a memory. But it did not feel like longing.
In the fourth shop he passed, he found some of the instruments, intact - tongs, clippers, rods, a blowing pipe. He went out and returned with a piece of cloth to wrap a few of them in and carry with him. Just in case.
He climbed to the roof of that workshop, but there was little he could see from it. He was in the midst of the city now, deep within its embrace, and he still did not know its name.
But on the fifth day, he found the temple.
There was no sense of distant familiarity there: he knew exactly what it was. The gilded sun over the doorway was unmistakable. The doors were still closed, undamaged, but they swung open at his touch, as though they had waited just for him. The air inside was damp and cool, moss allowed to grow freely and soften the hard stone of the walls. The low-lying arches creating the artificial cave stretched like the arc of the sun across the sky. He walked between the two long tables, across the row of bright glass murals that gleamed in the floor, and up to the pedestal. Though thus tucked away within the belly of the city, this was no poor man's temple: he stared up at his god's form carved exquisitely in white marble, crouching on top of the groaning sacrificial bull, touched by a flash of gold - a beam of light from a gilded sun. He knew every detail and every symbol, knew it like a brand inside his eyes and heart.
He dropped to his knees, and as he bowed his head to pray, his eyes found the carved letters on the altar itself: To the folk of Tezzei, Eastmost city of Ilyiga; from their brothers to the Faith across the Median Sea.
His eyes grew wide. His fingers brushed the marble. "Tezzei," he whispered for his prayer. "Tezzei."
His words to his god were all thanks, all elation. When he rose and opened the doors again, they opened back into the elevator.
Date/Time: May 24th to June 10th.
Location: The Fourth Floor
Rating: Up to PG-13 for dead people and unpleasantness.
Summary: Kindly fishbowl tree sends Ilyigan to the Fourth Floor, to the city he was born in.
Ilyigan left his journal on the floor of the elevator. He'd written a farewell message of sorts: it had stopped interesting him the moment that the door opened and he was free again. The elevator door has deposited him outside a watchtower along a low wall of stone, and when he looked past the battlements he saw across a city.
His first thought was that the city was beautiful. A moment later, he was not sure why he had thought that: the city was, more than anything, war-wounded. Smoke rose in high pillars from half a dozen places, and even up on the battlement he could breath a lungful of the stench of human rot. It was not beauty, exactly, that had tugged at him in this city of arches and canals, of curling streets and fountains. It was..
His heart ached at the very center of his chest, a tender pain, like seeing a dead lover's portrait.
He walked along the cobblestone path on top of the city wall: seeing as far as the river mouth, where the largest of the fires burned, probably consuming the docks and warehouses. Up from there, he traced the fat, lazy river, blue and brown, and the looted mansions that crumbled into it bit by bit. Some of them showed banners, but he could not read them nor recognize the heraldry, and thought that he didn't care either way. Beyond those marble giants, growing closer and snug together as one looked deeper into the neighborhoods, the houses were brick and stone and close to the earth. Fierce green climbers and small gardens grew wild everywhere. It was nothing like the clean order of Edensphere. But it was a lot more like him.
Where am I?
Slowly, forgetting the elevator for the moment, he walked down from the battlements and spent the first day walking the river, staring into the broken windows of the mansions and leaping canals where bridges had been smashed. Many of the houses had the echoes of splendor: marble statues, great painted ceilings, chandeliers. But little that was bright or pricey remained intact. Some mansions were yet sealed and barred, and if anyone lived within, he could not resent them not coming out to greet a guest.
And there were bodies, of course. Here and there, on stairways, strewn face-down in pools and canals. floating on the river all bloated and gray-green. They were of every age, sex and manner and their dead eyes were all alike where they still had eyes.
That night he ate olives and citrus fruit from some garden with a broken wall and that had to do. He knew better than to drink from the canals or the river. He slept in a looted house and was woken every hour by distant gunfire.
The next day he wandered deeper in, choosing a canal and following it until it ran across another. Bit by bit, he charted a path into the smaller quarters. He was in no hurry - he stopped to look at everything. Hidden vineyards tucked behind houses, twisting iron work on gates and fences, faint grooves that showed where carts would list in a sharp turn. Businesses, too, not only homes - bakeries, wineries, a butcher's shop, a shoemaker's. Some ransacked, all closed.
And the glass shops.
He ran across the first one on the third day and spent more than an hour staring into its smashed window. Very few of the delicate treasures within had remained intact, but enough to make his breath catch in recognition of the style. The tiny beads of glass, like seeds or miniature flowers, stuck together and crafted into full shapes from medallions to vases. Blue, red, green, he knew them all. He looked down at his hands and imagined holding a different kind of steel altogether - it felt like a memory. But it did not feel like longing.
In the fourth shop he passed, he found some of the instruments, intact - tongs, clippers, rods, a blowing pipe. He went out and returned with a piece of cloth to wrap a few of them in and carry with him. Just in case.
He climbed to the roof of that workshop, but there was little he could see from it. He was in the midst of the city now, deep within its embrace, and he still did not know its name.
But on the fifth day, he found the temple.
There was no sense of distant familiarity there: he knew exactly what it was. The gilded sun over the doorway was unmistakable. The doors were still closed, undamaged, but they swung open at his touch, as though they had waited just for him. The air inside was damp and cool, moss allowed to grow freely and soften the hard stone of the walls. The low-lying arches creating the artificial cave stretched like the arc of the sun across the sky. He walked between the two long tables, across the row of bright glass murals that gleamed in the floor, and up to the pedestal. Though thus tucked away within the belly of the city, this was no poor man's temple: he stared up at his god's form carved exquisitely in white marble, crouching on top of the groaning sacrificial bull, touched by a flash of gold - a beam of light from a gilded sun. He knew every detail and every symbol, knew it like a brand inside his eyes and heart.
He dropped to his knees, and as he bowed his head to pray, his eyes found the carved letters on the altar itself: To the folk of Tezzei, Eastmost city of Ilyiga; from their brothers to the Faith across the Median Sea.
His eyes grew wide. His fingers brushed the marble. "Tezzei," he whispered for his prayer. "Tezzei."
His words to his god were all thanks, all elation. When he rose and opened the doors again, they opened back into the elevator.