The Vanished City—From the Journals of Monssiur DuPont (Historia Tempori: roll I: pillars iv-iii)

The Vanished City of of the Starlords.

THE VANISHED CITY

There below a dying sun of amber heaven, pervading everything with a soft, uniform luminosity. It awaited, motionless and silent, with no evidence of life in all its preternatural landscape.

In the foreground of this amazing scene, not more than three miles away, there loomed a city whose massive towers and mountainous ramparts of living metal were much akin to to old stories of the Vanished City of of the Starlords. A city the undiscovered worlds of which a future race might build. Wall on moving wall, spire on twisting and rotating on giant spire, it soared to confront the heavens and make them stand at its feet, maintaining everywhere the severe and solemn lines of an architecture whose purpose would always remain unfathomable to even the most intelligent of minds. Even from this distance the cities atmosphere seemed to overwhelm and crush down the beholder with its dizzying imminence.

Ward of the Slumbering Tsars

My initial sense of bewildering loss and alienage upon first sight of the city, was only broken by my actual terror mingled with a profound allurement, hypnotically emanating from the city as if of some enslaving spell. But only after the wild desire to escape from the maddeningly oppressive bizarrerie of this region and regain a sense of my own world did I turn back, through no great degree of profuse effort.

When I returned days later, the city was gone. It had vanished once again.

—The Journal of Monsieur DuPont (Historia Tempori: roll I: pillars iv-iii)

Each tower a city unto itself.