Cities

Cities and Memory

You have two ways to find the presence of time: you can sneak into your brain without noticed by the memory itself and fill in the gap aside from the peak of the present, and you can go through any door in Olvido. You can find that you arrive here subconsciously; you may not feel rapture or experience adversity before, but you come with a goal. You could see the buildings with varying colors in the sky, and probably after you move your sight on it, at once it floats upon the sky. You can’t perceive what is real in Olvido, as you always find a way to reach anywhere. When you open a door, the web of future and past could besiege on all sides, constructing a strong clear bastion in your mind. The harder you can perceive the scenes in Olvido from a perspective of an observer, the clearer you can perceive after feeling it. The memory is fixed, but you could find different versions behind different doors, as well as windows, although they’re more blurry. Your own eyes and mind, can exploit their functions unparalleledly ultimately as before: one is input and one is output. People living here look like just normal. Still, technologies, society, monopolists, carnivals, dreams and religions exist as they do. You are not a traveler, a stranger; you are a native, an inhabitant. However, you might find people can’t see you, listen to you or connect any memory with you, and you go along with your exploration. You would find your own haven forthwith after arriving in Olvido. Hustle and bustle around you can’t alter the future and past, since they are future and past themselves. In their eyes, correcting what they did is just as futile as fixing the past in your mind, so don’t try. In your tiny dwelling, future gives you years of burdens; past causes regret, motives and even gluttony, so don’t fall, even if you couldn’t make any changes. You can’t identify the reality in Olvido, existentially, as you can’t do that where you come from. Music and paintings perpetually echo with withered essence, and beauty and colors strike on mind in sleep, receding in already familiar ways; craziness and hope in distant exist in forms you wouldn’t expect, and everything has the same denouement in the far future. Olvido isn’t all mighty. You can see thousands of pieces of the past or future, but you can only detect the present while scrutinizing your own mind. If people don’t scamper off from the city, Olvido is always there, but the present is not always here.

Cities and Nature

Beyond ten mountains and four valleys rises Lasgon, a place I can never forget, having seen it. Camels can’t take me to inside valleys, but I can perceive with everything I have, and that is enough. The surrounding mountains, regardless of their own ultimate elegance and greenness, polish up only the forests they package in as a whole. Lasgon, city of the thousand ponds, grows azure pupils and cerulean lens and stares at surreal fragrance amid the city, and I can only see the small fraction of it, since there are no buildings on the lush ground. I feel the pond through its gentle but potent caress and the gleaming reflection from the dim light under layers and layers of clouds. When I invert my head, the whole picture looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across Lasgon, slightly separating stratums of the indistinct atmosphere. I try to identify if society exists in this place full of traps, but I fail easily due to the demanding desire of staying still and it is exactly like my will is controlled by unknown angels or methods.
I am thirsty as I can’t remember if I drank before, and mist and beads of water permeate the whole city as I step into it. Tasting them only worsens the symptoms, including the ability to sense the beauty of Lasgon itself and create a bridge toward underground. Ah! I can see old men fishing beside one drop within thousands of ponds, repeatedly nagging events that ended ages ago. In Lasgon, I see this as a dock of tranquility which can absolve every piece of evilness inside me, but I can never know the true, nefarious and devilish essence of the elegance and purity themselves. When I try to approach the villagers, my throat swells, phonates, call for help because of the deathly impending thirst. I choose to neglect and I choose to realize the truth of this city which keeps seducing my attention; however, unfortunately it’s the end. I die in a place of water, silence and ponds. The pond where old men perch is Lasgon’s faithful heart. It is the way Lasgon glaring myriad pieces of beauty outside this place, looking at underground as if there are grandiose secrets there. The waving men next the shore are the slender eyelashes, and the wooded hills and mountains around are its soft but robust eyebrows. The fact proves that I’m wrong, as the underground had never been grandiose. I can never know that the city’s stores and streets lie deeply underground with elders live; they will soon fall into the extravagant, surreal heaven with the landscape withering on the ground, but the mountains will breed new elders, and also cultivate Lasgon itself, soon.

City of redeem

We can now see the city with possibilities and reborn: it accepts you just like how you accept it and its appearance is exactly as tricky as its full desire inside. The serious, powerful and unsettlingly humongous panopticon sits like some solid rock thrown by an unknown god with intrigues; and you can see the invisibly streaming cords bridging each neighborhood and houses to this center of storm. The only difference among travelers’ eyes is the color. Color goes for the theme. The picture is painted as full of dark, gray petulance and themes chosen for any unfortunate destinies. Black clouds in the form of layers and pieces of chunks ramming the whole city with extraordinary power fly over heads, and “None escaped and none returned,” they shout. That was how you and your priest see, but it is inverts in your criminals’ sight. Colors could appear, and they can perceive the scent of other people like them: fragrance, beauty and anything they deprive from the victims, and you can find no similar values in the place. Only rotten, decayed stench from citizens, or they don’t deserve the title. Stania is in charge of purifying them and it has done so for an innumerable amount of criminals. When the last spiritual brightness is extracted from the cohort to that panopticon, the living corpses collapse into crumbles while their last glare is gleaming due to greed, lust and pride, not even attempting to escape from the pretended heaven. You have to admit that this is how Stania works, and how irresistible it is. Prisons are painted as a haven, as colorful, as invigorating, as attractive as possible and all residents in these filthy streets will converge into that central building someday. Your criminals watch through their heavy, misleading glasses to see their master giving desires, and inversely offer up enormous power into this hellish city: pitiful slaves. You think in vain to explore the Stania, and your priest, even your horse can’t escape by Stania left as an unsolved appearance. You believe you are visiting it wholly when you are only a tiny gear in this perpetual running.