Dark Provinces: Broken Waters

You thread your way through a serpentine defile of vermilion, carmine, and imperial purple. Rose and cinnabar cliffs ascend to vertiginous heights, admitting only a ribbon of azure sky.

Here and there, oleanders lift their venomous blossoms above hidden springs, while ghostly tamarisks and dark cypresses draw emerald life from watercourses, lending an improbable luxuriance to the living rock.

Then, at the final twist, the canyon walls draw apart, and you come at last to the threshold of Adam-Ondi-Ahman.

For a moment you stand, mute and unblinking, forgetting both duty and doctrine, before a vision of such grandeur as to be a dream of some elder age made manifest.

Vast façades, sepulchers, and temple-fronts are hewn from the cliffs themselves, so that the city appears less a habitation than a revelation long imprisoned within the mountain. Colossal blocks, porticos and cyclopean tombs glow with hues of amber, porphyry, and wine-dark crimson beneath the funeral splendors of sunset, while hanging gardens and terraces cling wherever water whispers from rock.

It is a scene seemingly wrought by the dreams of despots and the labors of forgotten gods.

Yet beneath its beauty lingers an indefinable melancholy, as though the city conceals some ancient truth that faith and empire alike struggle to keep entombed, an immemorial corruption that has necessitated your coming.