City

Everyone knows that the city is a strange place. Whenever visitors arrive, they stop and stare, jaws dropping like flies and eyes wide as saucers. They tell everyone they meet - be it fellow tourist or hapless native - that the place is completely different, like nowhere they've ever seen. The citizens of the city are used to this, although they pretend otherwise,  and claim that every generation of outsiders is worse than the last. There is truth in their claim. The city has grown stranger as the years passed, and does so still, so that what it is now is worlds different from what it was at the beginning of the day.

Everyone knows that the city is a dark place. Which isn't to say that there is no light. The city itself is full of light, stars captured from the heavens and placed on every street corner, stranger sky-beasts glowing and pulsing in lanterns, or following children on leashes, signs flickering and calling for someone to enter. Everything in the city has light, to make up for the sky without a sun. The sun itself has not been seen in centuries - or perhaps it is seen all the time, a single star in the night sky that has yet to be captured. No one is sure anymore.

Everyone knows that the city breeds stranger people. No true denizen of the city will blink an eye at people who have extra arms, or extra eyes, or fewer fingers, than might be considered normal. (In the city, there is an average of two and a quarter eyes, eight and a half fingers fingers, and two and a third arms. Normal is relative.) No one will look twice at a person who glows brighter than the stars in their glass prisons at every corner, except perhaps to call them over so as to read a bit of news by their light. Some people have scales. Some have fur, or feathers. Some people are ten inches high. Some people are twenty feet high. The city welcomes them and creates them all, and few ever want to leave.

Everyone knows that the city is impossible. It harvests stars and constellations. (Capturing the Great Whale, which can only be seen from the star Betelgeuse, was the biggest haul ever; tales of the catch are still told, a part of the city's legend). It is an island that is only in the same place twice if you have a rooster feather in your hat and throw a pinch of salt in the air before you look for it. It exists on a planet that has been mapped, and studied, and photographed into a static oblivion, yet cannot be found by someone who doesn't know where it is. It grows and changes by itself, it seems, or by the machinations of some strange race that lives in the sewers, or by those of angels, or maybe it is an angel. Every person who's ever gone to the city with evil intent towards it, or even simply wanting to study it, wakes up in the middle of the ocean, alone, floating on a piece of drift wood. At least, the ones that are found.

Everyone knows that the city is alive. If a person manages to find a quiet spot on the street, and stands there, listening, they will eventually feel a low, slow vibration, through the soles of their feet. Not a pulse, but the rush of life beneath. The pulse is so huge and ancient and slow that there are holidays to celebrate it, every ten years when it rumbles beneath the pavement.

But no one knows the city. It is unknowable, ineffable. It is a force unto itself, a vast, living thing that ebbs and flows with the lives of the people within. It is itself, and knows itself truly.