Slumrat Rising

Truth’s first impression of Xandre, the famed capital of Ancient Siphios, the birthplace of art, magic, philosophy, city of supreme culture and sophisticated pleasures, Xandre, Gem of the World, was a half-shuttered huddle of discount clothing stores and brickmakers. It was not a great introduction.

Just inside the exurban shopping belt were the small homes in their teeming thousands. Little flat-roofed boxes laid out side by side, each with a tiny strip of garden out front. Densely clustered, with wide sidewalks. A lot of buses moving people around, lots of people traveling on peculiar two-wheeled conveyances. Somewhat like his iron horse, but these didn’t appear to have any power source beyond their riders pushing pedals in a circular motion. It was the oddest thing he could remember seeing in a while.

Well. That wasn’t an actual religious experience. Still, they seemed happy enough. Even dawdling along the highway, he could see people stepping into and out of each other’s houses all the time. It seemed there was no such thing as a solitary… Siphionite? Siphiosian? Siphy? What did they call themselves? Truth shook his head and tried to focus on what he was seeing. Lots of people moving around, happy. Lots of hugging. A surprising amount of kissing. Not “peck on the cheek” kissing, either. Nobody seemed to see anything odd with it.

Here and there were dropped blocky apartment buildings, sticking out in the sea of small homes like a wart on a tit. Truth didn’t think much of them at first. They were just apartment blocks. Only so many ways you can make apartment blocks. The cheapest and simplest way is going to look the same pretty much everywhere. They were more or less what he remembered from Harban. After a distressingly long time, he shuddered with the realization- they were exactly what he remembered from Harban.

Of course, he recognized the buildings! How long had he stared obsessively at the brochures of Tier-C housing? He had memorized the floor plans of all four different apartment layouts. He had laid awake at night, listening to his parents scream at each other, listening to his neighbors fuck and tear each other apart, listening to people hammering on doors and begging to be let in before somebody got them- he had laid awake at night dreaming of those apartments. They were as close to heaven as his imagination could reach.

Here they were, rising like moles in the suburbs of Xandre. Looking a lot less divine these days. They had that grey-washed look to them that Truth associated with any multi-story building this close to the equator. Something about the constant humidity and the accumulation of dust and dirt thrown up by millions of passing vehicles. Surely there should be some kind of spellwork to prevent that? Something to keep the paint looking fresh? Perhaps they just felt it wasn’t worth it. Starbrite had certainly never invested in that kind of spellwork. Not that he had noticed. Or cared.

As they got into the city center, there were more row homes, more two and four-story buildings crammed side by side in happy intimacy. The people moving around seemed almost a colorful blur, carrying bottles of this and that, covered plates, books, boxes… Everyone visiting. Everyone chatting. He saw a few of his fellow white-round-hat wearers moving about, but they were a clear minority here. There were also a few of the small-decorative-hat wearers like Merkovah, but they were also a minority. Most people dressed like Jember and Etenesh- colorfully and with clothes cut to flatter.

It was disorienting, whiplashed between the invisibly ordinary and the startlingly new. People socialized in Harban, of course. It’s just that he didn’t. And he didn’t know of anyone who socialized the way the people of Xandre did. A thousand little touches, every day, linking everyone together in a whirl of colors and smiles. They seemed to like it, but he imagined he would go insane in less than an afternoon. When you got right down to it, he really didn’t like being touched casually. He was still refining his thoughts on this, but so far, he decided that if someone came into stabbing range, they probably wanted to be stabbed. And he had a wonderful sword with him all the time.

They pressed deeper into the city, and towers began to rise. Some glass and steel monsters that every city seemed to host, but others were seemingly carved from stone or ivory. More still were clearly grown- trees in electric purples like lightning bolts seventy stories tall, mushrooms of a modest forty stories, but wide as a city block at their cap. He could see shade parks growing in the mycelium shadow, with more colorful swirls gathering there to escape the late afternoon heat.

Here and there were stone temples in a more classical style- small windows, polished white exteriors of quarried stone. Many were densely covered in etchings, in reliefs, in votive statuary shimmering in their own lights, or dancing to hymns that only they could hear.

Perhaps he was wrong about that. Truth half wondered if he would hear the music too if he came closer.

Most brilliant and fascinating of all, though, were the spirits. Demons, angels, and everything in between, crawling, flying, striding through the city. Swarms of air demons poured along alleyways and cleaned the filth with voracious delight. Small spots of angelic light floated behind them, evaporating the demonic taint they left behind, turning the air fresh and sweet. Worm demons trailed over construction sites, driven on by sigil wielding construction workers, laying level after level of new construction or eating the old.

Any building of sufficient size and dignity would host spirits. The trees were nesting grounds for birds made of soft, licking flame, and electric blue birds whose shimmering, rainbow tails stretched for meters behind them. A statuesque ogre sunned herself, lying atop a mushroom. Tigers with burning eyes and burning wings stalked over the rooftops of libraries while wheels of eyes glowing with painful light kept vigil over temples.

The people of the city treated them as normal. Sometimes they saluted the spirits or shooed them away, or simply ignored the terrible beings that could snuff them out like a guttering candle. They were just part of the city. Only tourists would make a fuss.

Merkovah led them to a temple in the middle of the city. It wasn’t the biggest or the prettiest, but it had an age and density to it that Truth found immensely appealing. Its carvings shimmered with a lively light, and the statuary looked elegant. If occasionally obscene. Some of the carvings were not suggestive, they were instructional. Once again, nobody seemed to notice or care. He parked in an underground garage next to Merkovah’s upsettingly disguised carriage. The stone pillars looked ancient, but he instinctively felt they were solid.

Truth interrogated that instinct. He didn’t trust things that told him to trust them. He walked up to a pillar and inspected it as the cousins started unloading the carriage. They didn’t glow or shimmer with a mystical light or any of that nonsense. They looked like old stone pillars. He rested a hand on one. Felt like an old stone pillar. The whole thing just screamed, “I am what I seem to be.” Highly, intensely, profoundly suspicious pillar behavior, in Truth’s professionally paranoid opinion.

He touched it again. Why was this setting off alarm bells?

“It’s more real than you are used to seeing. Well, outside an active magical effect. Most buildings just can’t support that level of spirituality, even here in Siphios.” Merkovah came up beside him, touching the stone with a soft smile. “She’s one of the oldest Temples in the world. Not the very oldest, but… one of them.”

Truth was somewhat confused by the idea, then confused by his own confusion. It made perfect sense if you thought about it. If people could cultivate to become “more real” than the surrounding world, and “more real” was defined as becoming closer to God, moving steadily up the material hierarchy, then it was nothing odd that a truly ancient temple might do the same.

Perhaps that was what people meant by “natural treasures” or the sorts of goods that could be traded off-world. Was prismatic iridium more “real” than regular iridium? It would be worth finding out. His ignorance was felt like a stinging pain, a sharp shame for being so dumb. Even as he reminded himself that he was not dumb. That he had tried his best with what little he had been given. But he felt dumb, not knowing something that everyone else probably knew.

“So… why are we here? And why did we have to come here is such a rush?”

Merkovah shook his head. “Not a garage conversation. We will be busy, and the work will likely be unpleasant. Lucky you, you will have ample opportunity to test your understanding of Incisive.”

“Oh, good?”

“You will also be able to find some teachers who can help you practice your Valentinian Meditations. I can see some progress, but it’s slow going, no?”

“It’s the visualization. Hard to keep things fixed in my mind. Harder still to think what the “perfect” version of them would look like.”

“Totally normal. Takes years to truly master, if not decades. Don’t worry too much, and just keep focusing on incremental progress. With luck, we can find a way to accelerate the process a bit.”

“Eh?”

“Not a garage conversation. Come, young man. It’s been a long drive, and our rooms await us.”

Their rooms were simple and spare- a single bed with a small desk, a single lamp on the desk, and a small shelf. Everything else was communal. Communal bathrooms, communal dining room, communal library- everything was a shared space. There were even communal rooms to go have sex if you were so inclined. Which came as something of a shock to Truth but, again, was treated as not worth mentioning by everyone else.

“The assigned rooms are really for sleeping and quiet meditation. Sometimes, you just need to get away from everyone and have a little space for your own thoughts.” Etenesh said softly as they sat for dinner with the priests and temple workers. “The Temples are built to make sure you have that space. But everything else should be done as part of the community of the Children of God.”

“Right, but… everything?

“Why not? There is nothing shameful about any of it. Pride, vanity, greed, possessiveness, those things are shameful.” Jember snagged another piece of bread and went in for a chunk of vegetables. Dinner was a stew. Again. A stew-loving people, Truth had noticed. The charm had worn off. He was ready to eat something grilled on a skewer.

“I may be having a translation problem. “Pride as distinct from vanity? Greed is not the same as possessiveness?” Truth asked.

“Yes. One might desire a large, fancy room to themselves to display their superiority. This can be to impose their self-importance on others or merely to gratify themselves. Related, but not the same. Greed- wanting more to the point of cruel excess. Possessiveness would be hoarding what you already have in excess of reason. Related, again, but subtly different. And both thrive in isolation.” Etenesh was pushing her food around, not eating much.

“Alright, I get that this is a religious building but… even sex?”

“Why not sex?”

Truth struggled to put into words what seemed screamingly obvious to him. “People prefer to do it in private?”

“You can if you want. I mean, I’m not overly fond of an audience myself. Still, it’s nice to have people handy to help you change sheets and tidy up afterward.” Jember shrugged. “I think you may be confusing “not hidden” with “mandatory public display.” And it’s not like people are randomly having sex with each other. It’s not some free-for-all orgy.”

“That… alright.” Truth said.

“It’s just a room off to the side. Somewhere where people can connect,” Etenesh muttered. “Popular after weddings, obviously. Always pretty spare and easy to wash.”

Truth looked back and forth between the cousins. They were, until yesterday, cheerful, upbeat, sociable… and gave not the slightest hint that casual sex was part of their lives. The campus had been pretty empty, and it wasn’t like he was stalking the faculty or anything but…

“Is this just a temple thing? Or a Xandre thing?”

“No, but…” Jember looked a little sad. “The old ways are dying out all over. I guess you could say this is the last place our culture is staying strong. Hard to keep the faith these days.”

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