Friday, April 23, 2010

The Metropolis At The End Of The World

On a peninsula that reaches out like a vast claw into the void of the sea, sits a city that was founded aeons ago.
The sea itself is a mystery of existence, as it is not a sea at all, but a vast lake of salty water, seperated from all other oceans and bodies of water, and has been thus for so long that men cannot remember.
The peninsula and its interior hinterlands are dry and dusty places, windswept in the spring and autumn, hot and airless in the summer, whipped by stronger winds, rains and snow in the winter.
For such an unforgiving and bleak place to be the site of a city since ancient times defies the laws of nature itself, then. The city sits inside the curvature of the claw, making a site in the natural bay before it. And yet, these people, these people who defy the curses of nature, make their living there.
Who would come to such an unforgiving place, blessed by neither water nor soil: only blessed by those things which civilised men would call curses?
For the men that survive in this city in a far-off wasteland worship, not nature, for that would seem perverse in such a place. No, they worship the destructive force itself: the flame.
For, yes, I forgot to mention: this peninsula has another outlandish attribute. There are places in these environs where the very earth spews fire. The men that make their home here have also learned to worship and harness the primeval element itself. In this godforsaken place, the earth weeps black blood. The fire-worshippers here also make use of the earth's black blood. And thus do they make themselves into a culture.

The winds blow season after season, as though blown by the devil himself. Time passes, and from this remote and otherworldly spot, do legends and tales grow.
For to reach this place takes a feat of endurance all of its own: across mountains from the north, south and west, and the flat, enduring sea from the east. This place is not easy to reach (as though anyone would want to), and when the traveller, nomad, searcher, whatever, arrives here, he soon realises one thing: that this is The Metropolis At The End Of The World.

People of all inclinations, fair and foul, are silently driven here, as though by some chaotic force within them that seeks out the last place on earth. For although there are other places on the earth that may be drier, colder, hotter more remote, perhaps none of them have inclined men to build such a city there. No, there may be more extreme environs: but none have made their natural plight into such a cause for celebration as here. In this city, chaos itself reigns in the minds of its people.

In such a place, is where legends are born.

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