It's been the setting for most of my dreams over the past ten years. It's strange to have so many memories of a place you've never actually been.
The Enlightenment[Excerpt from Chapter 2]
Stealing through the narrow dark hall where each of her footsteps clanged and echoed like she was dragging chains from her ankles, she went into the small back room: a miniature library with three walls, the third of which was occupied entirely by a bowed yellow window. The light, streaking through the glass, deposited an amber gloss in between every spine, and left strips like golden ribbons wriggling along the shelves. She plucked a half a dozen gleaming volumes and brought them to the stark metal table that was bolted to the center of the room, and she scraped over the heavy metal chair.
She sat and flipped through the pages, as quickly as she could, but it wasn’t fast enough; through the window she could already see the tangled nest of raised highways growing below, signaling that they were near Abydos, the sparkling coastal city. Soon the highways would rise and then lower, flattening into the calm blonde oceans of the three breadbasket districts – Ithaca, Ulysses, and Romulus. Not long after, Nappanee would bubble out of the hot yellow sand of the Central Desert like a ruddy mirage; the Midlands would follow, breathing moisture into the sand until the landscape grew lush and green, and churned up hills and valleys on which little square houses bobbed like clumps of sea foam.
Center – the capital district – would be next after that. Miles before it was visible, Annaghmakerrig City sent out its dark tendrils, in the form of ancient black roads that were scorched into the earth. The trees grew dark feeding on its fumes, and the houses lost their eyes and stared like mummies. When it seemed that all of the oxygen had been sucked from the air – and every cell drained of its living center – the city rolled up off the back of the horizon like a grimy ghost.
It was utterly nonorganic; all angles and blackened glass, lightning bolt streets and razor-tipped corners, and tapered silver skyscrapers that ran like the teeth of a beartrap along the perimeter of it all. The River slashed through from the north; the two long walls tumbled down from the east and west, and in the triangular patch formed by their mutual intersections sat the Capitol, a piebald colossus, with its two fat sprawling arms and its two glass-capped heads – the Council Room and the Old Round Library.
In a quarter of an hour they would be there, lowering Domesday onto the platform on the south end of the building, and taking the stairs down to the top floor as they always did – only it was different, now – that whole building, that whole city, would be different with James Bradley inside of it ...
