>>5572908You must be, by the sights, sounds, and smells which greet you. The orderliness of the Hawksong city streets is hampered by an organic growth pattern—rather than rigid planning along any sort of grid or radial pattern, the ‘shining city’ is the product of nearly a millennium of growth, and the merging and interweaving of separate civic projects: a monastic complex housing holy warriors and those who sought shelter with them; a port town attending to travelers and fishermen; a trade hub where craftsmen and farmers gathered to sell their wares to one group or the other; the symbiotic and parasitic classes of greater or lesser breeding who latched onto those three economic communities and filled the gaps. Here, though, you find something neither organized nor organic, but something… Uncanny.
The routes through this part of town are bizarre, almost unearthly. They flow like rivers, spread like tendrils of some great fungus. They loops around and into each other, such that only Roth’s guidance keeps you from becoming lost. The domiciles here are obviously decrepit in many instances, but even if they were new constructions you struggle to think how some of the towering stacks of apartments could reliably withstand the test of time. Some are wider at the top than the bottom—it defies physics!
“Magic,” Roth says simply.
“So much of it, though!” Olu notes wonderingly. “Even the paint… The colours shift and change,d epending upon the lighting, the angle that you look at it from… I do not even have words for some of these colours!”
He is right, and it is not merely Oluwadamialre’s vocabularic limitations—you, raised by the Chaplain and taught of the Northmen and of this mage-village within the city, lack words as well. But these wondrous colours are faded, even as they still fascinate the eye. The paint of ages is peeling, revealing the rare sylvan wood beneath. This place ahs seen better days. The arcane forces which sustain it grow weak and thin.
The Tower itself, though… That still impresses.
