The Dreamlands are liminal in the most literal sense of the word. Here is a place which wanders, whose reality cannot be defined. Change is the only doctrine; ever are we between Life and Death, Dark and Light, Sleep and Waking, when we wander Dream. This is a description of a place between the work of Man and Nature. Read on, I invite you. Don't get lost.
The False City of Aeon:
Nobody's Home
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No architect made this place. Nothing thinking nor feeling calls the city home. Yes, we walk its greying halls, carpeted in striated mosses. Yes, we peer with curiosity and revulsion at the natural, bioluminescent polyps that so closely resemble lamps. Yes, the brittle stone forms perfectly rectangular openings, of just the right height and width to traverse. But nobody lives here. Nobody ever will.
Aeon is a city drawn from the earth, and it appears identical to any modern urban settlement, albeit empty and abandoned. The truth, however little that means in the Dreamlands, is that the stone made it. It was never built, never lived in, never abandoned, but it is undeniably a city.
Any dreamer who walks its streets will very soon begin to wonder- why, then, do we think we are so special? What good is building a city if the earth may answer with one of its own? What makes us human if not the complexity of our colonies, seen nowhere else, but...
But here. Here, where the fungus stalks blink red and green and yellow to signal trundling isopods to roll forward. Where slitted, niter-caulked grates let rain water run into the slimy subterranean rivers below. Where a colony of howling-bats screech the night-hours from a spire that looks curiously like a clock-tower. Where stiff reeds sprout up through cracks in the rock, twining into thorny fences.
A city with no people; a city with no need for us. A stony, faceless urban hell-scape that seems to somberly declare "You are not special. You are not free. You are simply the means by which the City entered your realm. And as long as the City is there, it owns you."
Until I can get pictures for each of the locations, the Observatory stars will have to suffice. Look out for a change soon!
Return to the Observatory...