lightning garden

There is a city at the edge of the Mauve Sea. It has five districts, five Ends, each of them not in a direction, but a direction. They mix together at their edges in a fractal patchwork, send pseudopods and feelers past each other, and grow exclaves inside one another. They are only a little apart — a millimetre off, half a second out of sync — but enough.

Sometimes standing in one End another can be like a foreign continent; other times their borders blur together in a web of innumerable hairline fractures so that a single step takes you through all five. You can cross the city, spend days, weeks, even years there, and only encounter one End, see only its buildings and meet only its denizens, never even suspecting the other four exist. In other times and places, the lines separating them become porous and a single step in the wrong direction, an incline of the head in a wrong angle, or a lone, errant thought can send you hurtling to another End, an alien city heard of only in half-caught whispers, its streets unfamiliar and deceiving, the buildings shadowing them unfriendly, and the inhabitants cold and uncaring.

In the city at the edge of the Mauve Sea, no building is ever taken down. This is one of its laws: anything once given walls and a ceiling must stand until time it fell. Buildings are abandoned, but never destroyed. They are lost amid each other, forgotten along feverish, tortuous alleyways, pushed over to other Ends, sunken into the ground, buried behind new exteriors. New construction grows out from their gaps, over, under, and inside them. Buildings merge, multiply, undergo mitosis, proliferate and metastasise like cancer. Façades are shells, each hiding a hundred interiors. The city, a nautilus eating its own tail, grows on its own ruins, shedding, abandoning, and re-taking them over and over again, level upon level upon level and wall after wall after wall.

The buildings are stone, concrete, steel, wood, glass, clay, reed, dung, plastic, paper, leather, crystal, copper, lead, chitin, mercury, rubber, bone, keratin, tooth enamel, asbestos, porous living tissue, ectoplasm, despair, orgone energy — materials from all times and all places, materials forbidden everywhere but there, impossible, improbable materials, materials not yet invented, and materials long since forgotten, all flowing together, mixing, combining, and merging.

A thousand architectural styles battle, cross-pollinate, form symbioses, and parasitise each other. Gargoyles grin lewdly from the windows of glass and steel towers, ornately engraved gambrel roofs crown concrete bunkers, Brutalist blocks reach up in sprawling pagodas, fortified ramparts germinate out of trailers and shipping crates, pyramids and ziggurats sprout pulsating growths of giant fungi, and transparent habitation bubbles shaped like platonic solids colonise the corpses of dead sea monsters and giants, whose rotting body cavities butchers, alchemists, decorator-surgeons, and trappers race each other to clear into kitchens and living rooms.

Exits and entrances open into bedchambers, boulevards snake through bathrooms, libraries bleed into industrial halls, illegal cops build their jails in the corners of attics stuffed to the brim, staircases branch out and wrap into themselves, lift shafts turn seamlessly into rivers and cabs into gondolas, restaurants spread their terraces over the walls and roofs of offices, and banks receive their customers in outhouses. Blueprints perform exotic hypergeometries and contort themselves into impossible, unsolvable labyrinths. Indoor and outdoor, private and public are meaningless concepts. Maybe the streets are corridors, maybe vice versa — outer walls inner, floors ceilings, doors windows. Maybe the city itself is a single building and the five Ends its rooms; maybe the city is the yard and the rest of the universe an indoor space.