Exile

In his third life he had been the judge of Hestern. An architect of a new world, scrounging from the midden of the old.

With him, ten-thousand refugees of a murdered world raked through the muck of their toppled race and grew a soaring junk fortress; her uneven walls a regurgitation of failed defenses, towers borrowed from the ruins of Mousk and Cait and Ys, their spindly buttresses a cobble of obsidian and offal.

They called her Elesarp, the Lady's carrion.

Her ten-thousand immigrants were a stew of anomie; they danced and alloyed around coal-fires, bought and sold pieces of their deathless bodies. They could still imagine time, but it was inconspicuous, liminal. The cycles unpredictable and overlapping. All the yesterdays became a muddled before-since. All the tomorrows, a singular later-again.

Their counterfeit revelry flattened into stultified ambivalence. Many surrendered to a hope of final, total sensory deprivation, immuring themselves beneath the streets. A thing was discovered exhuming them, feeding on their memories and splicing their bodies onto its own; a grotesque likeness of Elesarp herself.

A silt of dross accumulated, putrefied, and kindled. Transient fire roamed the citadel, and some fled to the windblown wastes. They hid themselves in cærs, and with some art they had discovered, crafted automatons to keep as companions.