The clumping masses of its buildings are punctuated by great high towers like fingers of stone, hand-wrought lanterns powered by the modern marvel of hydroelectricity, delicately arching bridges woven of glass and audacity, and architectural structures called balconies that are so simple, yet so breathtakingly foolish, that no one has ever built them before in written history. The city’s walls are a masterwork of delicate mosaics and embossing detailing its people’s long and brutal history. Yumenes is unique because here alone have human beings dared to build not for safety, not for comfort, not even for beauty, but for bravery. Elsewhere in the world villages rarely grow into towns, and towns rarely become cities, because all such polities are hard to keep alive when the earth keeps trying to eat them… but Yumenes has been stable for most of its twenty-seven centuries. There are many large cities in this part of the world, chain-linked along the equator like a continental girdle. Yumenes is not unique because of its size. It is still the heart of many things, though the empire has wilted somewhat in the years since its first bloom, as empires do. The city is called Yumenes, and once it was the heart of an empire. The end begins in a city: the oldest, largest, and most magnificent living city in the world. It’s one vast, unbroken continent at present, but at some point in the future it will be more than one again. Naturally this land’s people have named it the Stillness.

Like an old man lying restlessly abed it heaves and sighs, puckers and farts, yawns and swallows. Ordinary, except for its size and its dynamism. Mountains and plateaus and canyons and river deltas, the usual. Let’s try the ending again, writ continentally. What she thinks then, and thereafter, is: But he was free.Īnd it is her bitter, weary self that answers this almost-question every time her bewildered, shocked self manages to produce it: The world has already ended within her, and neither ending is for the first time. She will cover Uche’s broken little body with a blanket-except his face, because he is afraid of the dark-and she will sit beside it numb, and she will pay no attention to the world that is ending outside. There is a thing she will think over and over in the days to come, as she imagines how her son died and tries to make sense of something so innately senseless. LET’S START WITH THE END of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.įirst, a personal ending.

The fifth season series order