The crater-city believed itself to be the center of the world. Generations of architects, theologians, and engineers had read it ring by ring, each level an interpretation of what was thought to be a vanished deity’s mind. Its terraces fell into fog so deep no one had seen the bottom. At the center, the tallest spire pointed not toward heaven, but toward a single, forgotten question.
In an age when dates had blurred, she carried her sword through a canyon of towers, walking the city’s accumulated interpretations while refusing each one: every street an outdated doctrine, every plaza a misheard commandment. The deeper she went, the darker the towers became, yet an eerie, sourceless light still seeped through the stone, as if the city itself were unwilling to let her lose her way.
Once, a magnificent cathedral had glowed with the stolen radiance of a dome overhead, an artificial sky set spinning by old prayers. At its heart rested the core machine: a choir of algorithms humming in harmonies of stone and data, tirelessly recreating a god that never answered.
Later, after the dome had fractured and vanished, a woman watched the stars above the city’s ruins. She wore the emblem of the city, though she didn’t really know whose symbol it had been. The constellations stretched above her like pages the city had never bothered to read. Standing in the wreckage of that great attempt, she understood the quiet heresy at the heart of the night: that perhaps the divine had never been missing at all - it had simply refused to be reduced to architecture, religion, or technology.