The interminable notes fall silent, and we are left among the columns and the smoke. Bear witness, it whispers softly as always, and then we are alone again. Before us stretches an unimaginably vast plain, flooding outwards from the plateau at our feet and widening, unchanged and endless all the way to the horizon. It could go on forever. We have witnessed such things before.
There is never anywhere to start. We have no direction but forward, whichever way we face. We walk. In a generation of lifetimes of a city of immortals, we have always known walking. The sun does not move. The horizon does not change.
At the base of the foothills, a path begins abruptly. We follow it for lack of alternatives. It twists once, unexpectedly, then follows some hidden ruler straight onward into the sun, frozen in time a hairsbreadth from plunging beneath the line of our sight. The precise lines of the road reek of arrogance to our heightened senses: the sickly sweet scent of pride not quite masking the sour whiff of something darker beneath. We do not comment. Such sensations are hardly rare.
The plains stretch for years either side of the road's arrow-flight: they are staggeringly uniform. Every blade of grass seems planted in rows, as if they were a million acres of carefully husbanded trees. Not a single one steps out of line. Even in our experience, it is singular. Eerie. Every so often, as though timed and called forth by hidden mechanisms, a breeze ripples gently down from the hills, sweeping perfectly patterned waves across the whole world before us. We walk on.
"Pride?" Voice asks, uncertainly. His tone sees somehow wrong amidst the unchanging sea of rhythm.
"Pride," I answer. "And perhaps something more. Something - " I pause. "Something new?" No-one speaks. There is nothing so be said.
We walk. The silence is absolute: there is nothing to be said. The sun hangs red and huge, frozen, daring us to move. We make no conscious reply, no conscious decision. We have a road: we always have a road. We always walk.
We walk on.
Many men, it is said, understand the complexities of time. They study it, the experiment upon it, they theorize about it. Sometimes, they almost forget that they live it, and in the end they all fall to it, every last one. Time, they said, was not merely a line but a curve, a circle, even a sphere. When we talked - a rare thing, and powerful - about time - rarer yet, and the hurt of it to the first as knives are to pinpricks - we often wondered at this. What mattered the picture of time, Freedom shaped aloud: the effect was always the same, the end inevitable. I stay silent during such discussions. They are not my place.
To speak of time was painful. Is painful? It is so not because it hurts us, nor because it has taken things from us, as we once suspected would be the case. No. Though we have suffered much, and surrendered much, we do not blame time. Rather, we mourn it. Mourn it as one would mourn a long dead lover, one whom we thought would be a companion in twilight years. Now - if now can encompass such a thing - all is twilight. There are no more years.
After an indeterminate time - or no time - the picture changes. Still for miles stretch the rote fields, but now the vague shape of a city cuts the skyline in two. It should be a comfort, but it too seems somehow wrong, even from such a distance. It is not a thing we are given to wonder about. Slowly, it grows larger. We walk on.
If we were still capable of despair, or even sorrow, this would provoke it. As before, the uniformity is complete: no lines wind or straggle through the town, no buildings rise high into the bloody sky. Every structure sits, squat and square, in its place on the grid. There is no sense of architecture, only rulered roads stretched precisely between identical concrete buildings: it could be a work of monstrous art, so deliberate in its lines, were it not for the feeling of some diabolical mechanism lurking behind each door.
"If a machine could write a symphony," Audit whispers, "it would sound like the silence of this place. It is a symphony of one note."
"And yet," Seraph adds, ever thoughtful, "and yet, somehow discordant." Our talk falls silent.
There is no movement, yet we know the city lives. We are always at the doorway, always the gatekeepers. We search onward: the key is here. Life, however twisted and abused, floods this place like a torrent, it rages under the surface, forcing its way through the narrow channels, eating away at the rigid foundation of this place, locked in its stone form. There is life, forbidding and strong and begging to be unleashed.
This is unexpected. It is illogical. For the first time in millennia, it tugs at our mind to stop, to confer. To choose?
We walk on.
The streets do not change. There are no names. They do not narrow, but close in slowly around us all the same. The buildings are identical, measurable to the inch, yet they seem to block out more and more of the unmoving sun with every step. Something is out of place. It occurs to all of us, silently and suddenly, that it may be us.
But we are never out of place. We are never unneeded. In the lifetimes of stars, in the distant memories of their forefathers we have walked. We have always walked. We walk on.
With abrupt and savage angles, the street widens to become a square. No other roads lead from it, only our own path. Around us like a wall, the backs of houses stand, windowless in grey, radiating outward in their concentric squares, fanning out like an exploding thought-scream, racing and racing in fear from this spot. I hear the muted gasps and growls around me. I ignore them. Everything, every shred of being I can call my own is focused savagely, desperately on what lies before us.
In the centre of the open space stands a cathedral.
