Work Text:
Due to the incompleteness of our understanding of the Eliksni language and our lack of, uh, Eliksni allies, what we have at the moment is an approximation of a translation. Our translation of the title alone is not entirely accurate; it's literally translated as "Invisible Cities", but this leaves out a great deal of nuance in the original work. Our use of the word "invisible" is cold, and our colleagues here at the Cryptarchy seem to agree that it implies a sense of sadness at being ignored, invisible to the eye.
In reality, though, it couldn't be further from the truth. The original Eliksni title - and pardon me if I butcher the pronunciation - skan nasvos shar ra lun seems to imply a sense of regret and personification - perhaps that the cities aren't invisible, but they're invisible to us. We're the lifeblood of these living, breathing structures that we can only ever take for granted.
Alyx lay splayed out in bed, hair a knotted mess and her body only half-covered by her blanket, blinking in the morning sun as it leaked through the gap in her blinds. She absent-mindedly traced the faint lines in her ceiling with sunrise-blurred eyes, the oh-so-typical mid-century burgundy tiling found in half the buildings in the last safe city, the light only just glittering on the worn edges of every tile against the comfortable shadows of a home in the early hours of another morning on Earth.
She takes a moment to preserve the damage in her mind; the chips in one tile, the hairline crack running through another. Where the tiling meets the wall, the tiles are cut in half: some with precision, a clean and straight cut; others appear as if a hammer has been taken to them, and are cemented to the ceiling in fractured shards.
Alyx shifts in her bed, gently as first, as a splayed arm reaches out to the other side of the pillow. Random grasping at the space where the pillow meets the mattress, then at the gap between the mattress and the bedframe. Eventually, the hand retrieves a phone with two cracks running parallel down the length of the glass screen.
Alyx holds the phone above her head, obstructing her view of the ceiling, and fumbles for the fingerprint reader. A blast of white light catches her off-guard and she groans and squints as she quickly flicks through the options to turn down the screen’s brightness. 8:53am. 27 unread emails. Two meetings and a lecture scheduled for today.
As I mentioned earlier, Invisible Cities is a collection of short stories about the everyday lives of Eliksni citizens and the city of Riis that they lived in. We don’t have an exact date of when it was written, but from what little we know, it appears to have been collated and curated by members of House Judgement in the days leading up to the Whirlwind.
This particular reverence of the minutiae; the simple routines and otherwise ordinary nooks and crannies of the street may perhaps lend a different interpretation of the title. We each have our own view of the city, our own understanding of its streets and its people. The true title embodies the fact that, despite our best efforts, other people’s cities are invisible to us; that this collection of short stories is an attempt to preserve these invisible cities so they may last.
The hot water of the shower stings against her callused skin, and the blur of her eyes obstructs when she fumbles along the basin for the shampoo. She sweats in the steam, and rinses it back off. The water in this district of the city is harder than most; the crust of limescale stains the head of the shower, enough built-up to cut the laminar flow into sputtering streams.
The smell of the shampoo is of pomefig candy, a smell that reminds Alyx of her favourite liqueur, and of a small candy shop two blocks from her childhood home. That home isn’t there anymore; the Red War erased it from the last city, as it did her friends and step-dad. Too young. Sorely missed.
I think a direct connection could be made to our own perception of our golden age cities, these great monoliths to our progress as a species and from the Traveller.
The smell of mildew from a towel never truly dry permeates her nostrils, the blurred colours of overactive cones in her closed eyes dancing as she dries her hair.
Any further questions? Anyone? No? Okay. The essay's due next Friday, and you all know my office hours by now. Remember that you are allowed to collaborate; just please don't plagiarise.
She will breathe it all in.
Class dismissed. Until tomorrow.