Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

The Bricks of Gelecek BY MATTHEW KRESSEL

Matthew Kressel’s fiction has appeared in Interzone, Electric Velocipede, Abyss & Apex, Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Farrago’s Wainscot, and other magazines. He publishes Sybil’s Garage, a speculative fiction and poetry magazine, and is a member of the Manhattan-based writers’ group Altered Fluid. He is also the cohost of the reading series Fantastic Fiction at KGB, held monthly in New York City. He currently lives in Brooklyn with an array of noncarnivorous plants and a rapidly diminishing view of the New York skyline (due to real estate developers, a very special kind of demon). His Web site is www.matthewkressel.net.

We were not city folk. We lived beyond all borders, where the onyx sands merged with raven skies, where the desert beasts came to die and even the hated demons of Fintas Miel dared not tread. Out here, the stars twirled in strange orbits, the sun weaved drunkenly by day, and the wind blew steady, slow, and forever. They called this place the Jeen. I called it home.

Always in fours we came to your cities. The sand blew us into flesh, and we walked like men through your iron gates and your tented marketplaces. Dust fell from our fingertips, our feet—the dust of decay, of aeons, of ash. We touched your fruits and your doorposts. We patted the heads of your children and shook the calloused hands of your husbands. You smiled at us.

Within hours came the winds, the decay, the screams. Pits formed in the streets where we had stepped. Your statues rusted and blew away. Your houses fell to kindling. Your children vanished like whispers.

By dawn there was nothing left but a hole in the earth. And those who had carried thoughts of this vanquished city and its people found a blank spot in their minds, a void where once there were men.

We did this for pleasure. And of our name? We had none. For who remained to name us?

Sometimes I grew bored with the sundering of cities. Sometimes I wished to be away from my brothers and their boasts of desolation, so I wandered the desert under the drunken sun to entertain myself with the mysteries of the Jeen. The constant winds carried strange sounds on their wings: the dying whispers of aged widows, the murderous thoughts of jealous cuckolds, the suicide’s cry of regret as the soul fled the body. The voices spoke of objects and forms, but always their true concerns were intangible things: regret, shame, love, despair, the gamut of human emotions. I listened eagerly, for the voices spoke of a world beyond my own, a world I could never touch without destroying it.

I floated over the twinkling sands, when I heard a small voice, like a flute echoing off of a mountain. It cried out to the ineffable, “What am I?” And its sound was music, sweet and innocent, without rue for things come and gone or the dark cynicism heard often in men.

The sound danced above me in crimson wisps, like lingering campfire smoke. It zigged and zagged, hopped and paused, catlike, across the desert. The song haunted me for some reason I could not fathom, so I pursued.

The sun skipped across the sky as I followed the music, until the Jeen was long behind me. A thousand camel skeletons and their unfortunate riders lay wasted on the sands below, and still the voice sang.

A large city crested the horizon. Birds squawked in monstrous flocks above its thousand spires, and towers hugged its center like beggars waiting for handouts. On the heels of the city, just before the sand devoured all, was a small house. The smoke belching from its chimney reeked of ram’s bladder and hoof spice—a sin offering to the goddess Mollai.

A girl sat before the house and sang as she fumbled with toy bricks:

“The desert makes no promises,

She does not long abide,

For those who seek to find her face

No semblance they can find.

The sun burns down from heaven’s throne,

Turning all to dust,

And so I ask the Cosmos now,

Of what use is rust?”

Her words had the resonant pluck of a zither. Then I understood. Her song had entwined itself in the smoke of the sin offering, and the winds had carried her plea out over the desert to my ears. And the words, they stirred something deep within me that I could not name.

“Hello,” she said to me. “Have you lost your caravan? Are you thirsty?”

I had not intended to be seen. I had unwittingly collected myself into human form. “NO,” I howled like a sandstorm, trying to terrify her.

But she was unmoved by my words. “Who are you then?”

And I had the same question: Who was this girl who stood firm before the winds of annihilation? “Who taught you that song?” I asked.

“That’s mine,” she said shyly. “I wrote it.”

“You wrote it?” I said.

“Why? A girl can write song,” she said firmly.

“Of course,” I said. “But your song is … different.”

Her brown eyes twinkled in the sunlight as she studied me. “Who are you? I can tell from your clothes that you’re not Quog Bedu or Zwai Clan. And everyone knows you don’t walk Gelecek’s streets of glass and dung without shoes.” She pointed to my bare feet.

I grew frustrated with her questions and reached out for her head. With one touch, she would fall to dust within hours and would trouble me with her words no more. But a heavy man waddled out of the house. He carried a large cleaver, and his bare chest was covered in sweat and blood.

Instantly, I made myself as transparent as the sky.

“Come inside, Agna!” the man shouted. “Mollai is coming to bless our house!”

“Papa, we have a visitor!” she replied. “A stranger from the desert!”

“You can play with your toys later!” the man said.

The girl turned and saw I had vanished. She furrowed her brow and looked deeply disturbed. “But … he was just here!” she said.

A plump woman covered in offal shoved the man out of the doorway. She wiped bloody hands on her apron and thrust them to her hips. “Get inside now, Agna, or you’ll wish you were never born!”

The girl stood quickly, scanned the desert for me once more, then ran inside.

No thing of form had ever seen me and lived, let alone begged answers of me! As the smoke fluttered from the chimney, I comforted myself in the knowledge that one day my brothers and I would return to erase her city from existence.

I flew back to the Jeen in silence.

Years passed like dripping molasses, and I forgot about the singing girl. My brothers and I trod through the crystal kingdom of Aphelia, whose walls had stood for ten millennia, whose conquests were heralded in a thousand tongues. No one would remember its name.

We touched the port city of Mesach, built within the Pine Barrens beside the salty river Do. It disappeared as if it never were. We sundered Allia, Blömsnu, Cintak, Ektu El. Traders, on the way to a sundered city, would suddenly forget why they had ventured out into the harsh desert with overburdened camels. Cities vanished from minds, too.

How many walls fell under our hands, I could not count. But always, ambitious men built new ones. They raised towers of stone and wrapped domes with hammered gold. They adorned palaces with jewels and paved streets with tar and glass. Caravans traveled across inhospitable wastes to deliver mortar, wheat, and wine. After a time, a new city breathed under the stars as if it had existed for all eternity. I began to see these cities not as a thousand separate entities, but the organs of a much larger creature whose severed limbs always grew back.

One night, as I wandered the Jeen under the bright and nervous stars, I heard the girl’s song again:

“One seed planted may not grow,

Two seeds planted in a row,

Five seeds in my garden plot,

Mollai bless they will not rot.

One stone mortared may yet fall,

Two stones, aye a trinity,

But a thousand stones do make a wall

That stands for all Eternity.”

I followed her song across abyssal landscapes made gray by the pregnant moon, until I came to her far-off house in the city of Gelecek. I saw movement in a window, and I crept up to it, conscious not to take human form or to touch her house, lest it fall to ashes.

Agna sat upright in bed. In the years since I had seen her, she had grown inches. Now she had the body of a young woman, though she still had the face of a girl. She leaned into the pallid moonlight as she scrawled on parchment. Her small voice hummed a few bars, then she crossed out a word and replaced it with another. She hummed again and the notes brought me back ages. I recalled cities I had conquered and forgotten: the star-shaped city of Gelf with its bejeweled ivory columns; the ziggurats of Phalantine and its perfumed gardens; Karad and its herds of black giraffes.

I had no words to describe the feelings her songs evoked in me. I needed to listen until I understood what I felt.

“I thought I dreamt you all those years ago,” she whispered. “But here you are.” She was staring at me through the window frame.

I found myself in human form, though not by my own will. Her song had oddly drawn me into flesh. “You remember me?” I said.

“How could I forget? You vanished like smoke! And you smell like the deep desert,” she said. “Like a spent campfire. Like ash. Who are you?”

“I have no name.”

“But what are you?” Her eyes twinkled in the moonlight. “Are you a ’mancer? A demon?”

“I am dissolution. I am nothing.”

“What do you want with me?”

“Your songs,” I said. “They fill me with memories of forgotten places. They make me feel … I cannot describe it. Sing one again!” I demanded.

“Agna?” a voice grumbled. Wood groaned in the dark corners of the house. “What’s that sound?”

“Leave!” she whispered to me. “Father has killed thieves before!”

“Please,” I begged. “Sing another! Sing one now!”

“Agna!” a man bellowed. “If you’re using one of my candles again, I swear, I’ll beat you back to Kalagia!”

Agna mumbled a response, pretending to be asleep. Then she whispered to me, “Go away! I don’t know who you are, but don’t come back!”

In the far corner, a sphere of light blossomed around a candle. In the lambent flicker frowned the sweaty face of her father. He stepped toward us, and I backed away from the window into darkness.

“Is this how you repay me for training you?” her father said. “I told you not to use the candles!”

“But, I didn’t, Papa!” she said.

“Don’t lie to me, Agna! I smell soot!”

“I swear, it wasn’t me! There was a man! A stranger from the—”

He lifted a heavy belt from a chair and beat her with it. I watched from a distance and listened to the desert swallow her screams. When he had finished beating her, he said, “Go to sleep, Agna. You have to be up early for work. I expect you at Posterity Hill before first prayer.”

As he blew out the candle, she whimpered her acknowledgment.

I wanted to hear her sing again, but this was not the place. Then I recalled her father’s words, “Posterity Hill,” a place of men, and in the darkness I had an idea.

I traveled to the wastes beyond the Jeen, where the white sands breathe in irregular tides. Deep within a mammoth cleft of stone, I begged the demon Atleiu to craft me a suit of human flesh. In return, I promised her the only thing I could—destruction. She agreed and proceeded to cut skin from one of her human slaves, tempering it with the hoarfrost of the north and the iron stones that fall from the sky.

Whereas before, anything I touched turned to dust within hours, now—while encased in Atleiu’s suit—I could walk among men without destroying them. I could follow Agna anywhere she went. I could touch and be touched.

The sun was rising hot and huge in the east when I reached the first stone of Gelecek’s streets. I worried that Atleiu’s suit might fail. I took a tentative step with my sandaled foot onto stone. Always, when I decimated cities, I felt the ecstatic rush of annihilation. I sensed none of that now; the stone remained a stone.

“Posterity Hill?” I asked a bearded vendor, and he pointed with an arthritic hand deep into the city.

I weaved through a collection of low stone buildings. Clothing and bedding swayed from lines strung above me. People hurried past with satchels tossed over backs or barrows thrust before them. I smelled uncooked animal flesh and human feces, but the air was also dense with smells of sandalwood, sage, and the sweet twinge of honey. As men and women bumped me, I felt impotent; they would remain to bump others tomorrow.

I reached a sign that read POSTERITY HILL. FUTURE HOME OF THE JARRIFA FAMILY. High walls were fashioned with polished brown stones that jutted from the facade like giant thumbs, the work of a skilled hand.

“This is private property,” a shirtless boy said.

I ignored him and climbed to the top of the sloping road as he followed me. Young masons labored within a large stone foundation, scooping mortar and laying stones with advanced skill. From this plateau I glimpsed the full city. To my left, a hag’s spine of roads twisted into the desert. To my right, spires rose like candles into the sky.

“Did you hear me, feg?” the boy said, behind me. “This is private property!”

“There’s no such thing,” I said. But before he could scold me again, I descended the hill. I searched the base of the foundation until I found a corner where I could watch the workers without being seen, and there I waited for Agna.

Her father stepped out of a pavilion and walked around the foundation, admonishing the boys for apparent flaws that neither the boys nor I saw. One of the boys whispered to him and pointed at me.

“Who the frib are you?” Agna’s father said as he stepped up to the wall and looked down at me, his foot resting on a stone above my head.

I stood from my hiding place. “Is your daughter here?”

“What do you want with her?”

“Is she here?”

He leaped down to my level, and the ground shook with his weight. “Did you hear me?” he said. “What do you want with her?”

“You would not understand,” I said. “It is beyond you.”

“You freak!” he said as his fist slammed into my face. I fell onto my back. He kicked me, and I raised my hand to block the blows. With his next kick, Atleiu’s flesh suit tore at the index finger. When he tried to kick me again, I stuck out my hand, and his leg scraped my unprotected finger.

He gasped, while the ecstasy of nothingness coursed through me.

“What’s wrong with him?” the boys said. “Is he having a heart attack?”

Agna’s father bent over, holding his stomach. Then he stood, looked at me nervously, and said, “You stay the frib away from my daughter or I’ll kill you.” He walked up the hill and vanished behind a wall. Some of the boys chuckled and kicked pebbles at me until I heard his stern voice order them back to work. In the distance, Agna watched me until I heard her father order her back to work, too.

Carefully, I wrapped my torn finger back into place.

I circled the streets until I found a better hiding spot. On the opposite side of the foundation, three small walls obscured me completely from view, but a tiny slit allowed me to see out. The sun beat down on the boys as they worked, and Agna, to my joy, worked alongside them. Though she was the only girl among three dozen boys, they gave her no special treatment. She spread mortar and hefted heavy stones without help; she chiseled with practiced skill. But I noticed in her craft an attention to detail that the boys lacked. Every stone held her full consciousness. Every rap of her hammer carried the weight of aeons.

And she sang while she worked.

Oh, what sweet music! The boys sang with her; they mixed mortar by verse, carried stones by stanza, and finished walls by song, so that their labors resembled a dance more than a burden.

I knew the power of her song now and let it consume me. I reveled in forgotten vistas. Geysers from the oasis city of Sul erupted in my mind. The mirrored walls of Nier El Du blinded my dreams. The gargantuan city of Poc, carved from a single piece of stone, crushed me under its weight. I thought for a moment that this feeling might be greater than the bliss of annihilation.

“You!” Agna said.

I woke from my visions to see her peering down at me from the foundation wall. She threw her hands to her hips and frowned, and I recognized her mother in the gesture.

She sniffed the air. “I thought I smelled ash,” she said.

“Your songs, they are … beautiful—yes, that’s the word,” I said.

She glanced over her shoulder. “I was wondering who it was that Father beat this morning.”

“Now he has beaten us both,” I said. “We are kindred. By dawn, he will—”

“Kin? Hardly. You’d better leave, whoever you are. He’ll kill you. Don’t be stupid.”

“Tell me, Agna,” I said, “do your songs carry you to forgotten places? Do you have visions of dead cities?”

“What?” she said. She stepped back from the wall, mouth agape. “How do you know—”

“Agna?” her father shouted from behind her. “Who are you talking to? Is that feg here again?”

She stared at me. Then she shook her head and said, “Go away. Go away.…” But her words were insubstantial, like a desert cloud.

“Meet me at the bottom of the hill,” I said.

She disappeared behind the wall, and I knew she was mine now.

At the bottom of Posterity Hill, shadows crept across the ground as the sun turned overhead. Just after high noon, Agna’s small figure appeared at the top of the hill and scampered down to meet me.

“How do you know about my visions?” she demanded. “Did Mother tell you? Damn her!”

“No. I see them when you sing.”

“You said they’re ‘dead’ cities. What did you mean by that?”

“They have been forgotten. Erased. Yet your song rekindles their memories.”

Agna’s father appeared at the top of the hill surrounded by three boys.

“Let’s go!” she said. “Before Father sees us!”

We turned through the busy streets. The air smelled of cracked spelt, boiling beans, and the pungent reek of humans going about their business. Animals being slaughtered cried out and fell silent. She led me into a courtyard filled with date palms and speckled shade.

“They’re not dead cities,” she said. “They haven’t been born yet.”

“No, they’re very dead. But your songs give them new life.”

She frowned. “I’ve tried to tell Father about them. To let him know that there’s more to my songs than just music and words. But he won’t have an ounce of it. He says a woman needs a stable trade as much as any man, that my poems and music will only get me to a street corner, begging for change.”

“He’s wrong. I watched the boys sing with you. They work twice as hard under your spell.”

“Do you think so? Father works us all so hard. A song makes the day go by a little faster.” Her eyes filled with water. “The prefect plans to hire Father as his chief mason. When Father gets that job, I’ll be able to design buildings myself. I won’t have to take orders from him anymore. And when I turn sixteen Father promised to give his business to me. Says his back’s no good anymore. I’ll be free to create whatever I wish. I have dreams, things I want to build.”

I remembered that I had touched her father, that he would vanish from existence before dawn. “Your mother has a well-paying trade, though?” I said.

“Well-paying? She’s a seamstress in the textile guild. The pay is the only thing worse than the work. She doesn’t want me to follow in her footsteps, but I love working with thread, too. I often help her with embroidery. It’s wonderful. You can’t get the same precision with stone, not if you want to finish within this century.” She stared at her calloused fingers.

“And all through this has been your music.”

“Ballads have propelled me, ever since I was a girl.”

“Will you sing me one now?”

“Right here? Right now?”

“Yes!”

“This is silly. I don’t even know you.”

“There is nothing to know.”

She shook her head. “Well,” she said, “maybe just the one. You did get a beating, after all, just to hear one.” Then she began:

“By dawn, the sun, low on our backs

Is cool, while birds are singing.

By noon, the mortar’s showing cracks

And masons’ ears are ringing.

But come a week, a month, a year,

When chanced upon this hill,

Where Father’s eye had built a house

That stands upon there still,

I forget the sweat, the grime,

The shoveling of sand,

And fill my heart with future dreams

To build one by my hand.”

Vistas of dead cities assaulted my consciousness. But this time there were new places, cities I had not glimpsed before. Cities of glass. Cities in the sky. Even cities floating among the stars. Perhaps, as she had suggested, not all of these kingdoms were dead; some had yet to be created. I closed my eyes and savored the sweetness of them all.

“Who are you?” she said.

“Does it matter, my name?”

“Yes, it does. A man’s name is his being, his essence.”

“All the more reason why I have none.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “You come to me, begging to hear my songs, but I know nothing of you. Where are you from? What do you do? How is it that you have come to me?”

Agna’s father burst into the courtyard, surrounded by a dozen boys. They carried chisels and hammers and walked briskly in my direction.

“Agna!” her father shouted. “Stand back!” He smacked the head of a hammer into his palm. “You’re dead, stranger, do you hear me?”

I backed away. They could not hurt my true essence, of course, but they could destroy my suit. I needed it to last, for Atleiu was a fickle demon and would not craft me another one for aeons.

“Who are you?” she said to her father. “And what do you want with us?”

“What?” her father shouted. “Has he drugged you? You’re safe now, baby! Papa’s here!”

“Who?” she said. She looked like she was going to be sick. “I don’t feel right. Something’s wrong.”

But I had to leave. I fled the courtyard through the rear gate, and the boys pursued. I ran through crowded streets, hiding behind bales of tobacco and under piles of manure. When I was certain I had lost them, I headed back to my brothers in the Jeen. I was not troubled. By morning, her father and his rabble would forget.

“We have followed you,” my brother said to me that evening in the Jeen, as the bright stars oppressed us. “You entered a city in the guise of a man and walked among its people, touching them. This night, their walls hold firm. The winds are calm, and their children do not scream. Tell us why, Brother, you’ve broken our trust?”

I dared not reveal Agna’s power to enthrall with her song, lest they try to usurp her for their own. But I could not deny what they had witnessed. “We have no rules,” I said, “nor laws preventing me from doing what I have done. I followed my will.”

“But you are a thing of destruction,” my brother said. “That is your nature. What do you seek in the world of form?”

“Sometimes, in the winds of the Jeen, I hear whispers of human things. Have you never been curious to know what they are?”

“Sometimes, yes. But if I satisfy my curiosity, what purpose does it serve? The curiosity vanishes. One day, the thing which piqued my interest will vanish, too. All is impermanent.”

“Then so, too, is my interest in this city,” I said. “It will vanish. Your concern will vanish, too.”

“As all things do. But now our brothers need to know: What is it that draws you there, in the morning sun, to walk among them without destruction?”

I paused before answering. “Of all the cities we sundered, Brother,” I said, “how many do you remember?”

“Not many,” he said.

“None?” I said.

He paused. “Perhaps.”

“I go to that city, dear Brother, to remember.”

“But why? Nothing is worth remembering. Memories, like cities, fade.”

I felt pain when I realized that one day Agna would vanish from the earth. “What are we then, without our memories?”

“We are nothing, Brother. We have and will always be nothing. You may convince yourself, for a time, that you are more, but it is only self-deception.”

And with these words, my brother left me.

In the winds of the Jeen I heard a laugh.

I searched the desert six times to make sure I was in the right place. Yes, this was the spot of sand where Gelecek had once stood. Like a drying oasis, the city’s circumference had shrunken inward. Its walls were devoid of grandeur. A few leaning towers thrust into a cloudless sky, and scattered buildings spotted an uninspiring landscape.

And Agna’s house was gone.

I entered the city and hunted for her within its changed streets. “Where am I?” I asked its residents.

“This is Gelecek,” they responded forlornly, as if the city’s name itself was a curse.

“There was a foundation,” I said to an elderly woman mashing chickpeas. “On Posterity Hill. Do you know it?”

She shook her head. “Never heard of it.”

Of course, I thought. I had destroyed the mason who had created it.

“There is a girl,” I said. “Agna, daughter of a seamstress. Have you heard of her?”

The old woman squinted rheumy eyes at me. “Nay, but there’s the seamstress guild up on Trajen Row. Why don’t you bother them?”

I lost my way several times but eventually found Trajen Row, a cobbled dead-end street, with hundreds of dyed linens drying from hemp lines like standards. The air reeked of chemicals, and colored puddles filled the cracks between stones. Inside cramped buildings, hundreds of seamstresses stuck needles into cloth, combed lamb’s wool, or threaded looms. I found Agna’s mother working in a corner, her needlework tiny feats of prestidigitation.

She looked much thinner than I remembered, and her face was wrinkled and bitter.

“I’m looking for Agna,” I said. “Where is she?”

“Who the frib are you?” she said without looking up.

“I’m a friend. I was supposed to meet her today.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Agna, your daughter.”

She stopped her stitching and looked up at me. “Is this a joke? Did the girls put you up to this?”

“No. Please! Where is she?”

She started to cry. “You’re cruel. Go away.”

“This is not a joke. I’m not here for anyone but myself. I am seeking your daughter to…” After my last incident with her father, I tempered my words. “… to protect her from a great evil.”

She began her needlework again, then said to the sky: “Mollai, great maker, why do you torment me so?” Then she said to me, “I don’t know who you are, stranger, but your words sting. I never had a husband or a daughter, nor do I know this Agna you speak of. Now leave me.”

I backed away as the shock of her words consumed me. Always, when I destroyed cities, my destruction was total, complete. I had never been selective in annihilation before. It had never occurred to me that erasing her father would erase Agna, too. An alien feeling welled up inside me as I stepped out into the sun. It was … there was only one word for it—loss. A thousand linens snapped angrily in the wind. I walked the streets in a daze. I don’t know how long I wandered before I heard a voice.

A beautiful voice. It sang.

I followed the song around a corner, into an alley overgrown with weeds. A cat hissed at me and ran away. The voice came from a doorless building, and I crept inside. Half-finished canvases crowded a large studio, and the air was heavy with the reek of paint. Majestic cities adorned the canvases; some I recognized as cities I had sundered.

At the far end of the studio, a young woman danced her brush over a canvas while she sang:

“On the dark side of morn, the workers lie waiting.

Sunrise to sunset, their backs break in toil.

From out of the desert come caravans sweating,

Burdened with legumes, rich hemp seed and oil.”

“Agna!” I shouted. “You’re alive!”

The girl turned to me, but her face was not Agna’s. Her eyes were too green, her nose too buttonlike, her face too round. Not Agna, but a stranger.

Startled, she said, “Who are you?”

But her voice—that was Agna’s. “You won’t remember me,” I said.

She dropped her brush. “No! I’ve dreamt of you! Sometimes I dream that I lived another life, with different parents, in a different house. I was a builder of cities and a weaver of thread. Then a ghost came along and erased everything. I thought it was just a recurring nightmare. But that ghost had your face.”

“I’m sorry, Agna. I didn’t know.”

“Agna? That’s the name my dream parents called me. My name is Dina.”

“It’s a beautiful name,” I said, stepping closer.

“Stay away from me!” she said.

“I’m not here to hurt you, Dina. I only came to hear you sing.”

“Why?”

I pointed to her paintings. “These cities, why do you paint them?”

“The architects buy them. They tell me my drawings inspire them.”

“But why do you paint them?”

“I don’t know … they come to me…”

“In vision, when you sing.”

“How do you know that?” she said. “Who … what are you?”

“I am the no thing of the deserts beyond form and the sunderer of civilization. I and my brothers have destroyed these cities. I had forgotten them all. But your songs bring them back to me. I have the very same question for you, Dina. What are you?”

She looked sick. “It was real, wasn’t it? My other life. There were too many details, too many feelings. I had a difficult life, yes, but I had dreams and aspirations. And you destroyed all of that, didn’t you?”

“But you’re not dead. Don’t you see?” I said. “I couldn’t erase you from history. You spring back like the cities I and my brothers sunder.”

“You’re disgusting,” she said. “You destroy as easily as I create.”

“Perhaps, but for once in my life I want something else.”

The winds gusted outside, knocking over a few canvases. I heard the rasp of sand blowing against stone, and a familiar shudder of ecstasy coursed through me.

“A sandstorm,” she said. “I have to close the windows.”

“No,” I said to her as I stepped out into the sun. I knew him before he spoke, not by the way he walked, nor by the tailor of his clothes, but by his indifference toward all things. He gave a beggar a coin and patted him on the shoulder. He dragged his hands along the walls of a portico. He stepped up to me and paused. Every move was filled with emptiness.

“Hello, Brother,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

“I could ask the same of you. What business have you here in this flesh suit of yours?”

“You must leave!” I said. “Before you destroy this place.”

“It’s too late,” he said. “Our brothers have decided that your sojourn here shall end. We followed you to this city. Four of us walk inside these walls now, spreading oblivion. We love you, Brother, and when this city falls, you will return to us and be the soul we remember.”

“I don’t want to go back! Not yet! Please, listen to one of her songs! Look at her paintings! Then you’ll understand why I’m here!”

“There’s nothing to understand. There’s nothing at all. That’s the sole and final truth.” My brother smiled and fled the alley, patting a boy on his head as he turned the corner.

“Agna—Dina, come on! We have to go!” I shouted. I reentered the studio. But Dina had vanished.

“Dina! Where are you?”

I found a small door in the back. It led up a small, curving stairwell to a storeroom on the second floor. When I opened the door, Dina jumped out and stabbed me in the chest with a putty knife.

I pushed her away and pulled out the knife from my chest. There was no blood. When I dropped it to the floor, the blade shattered.

She pounded on me with her fists. “Go away! Go away!”

“Dina, Dina! Please, you must listen to me! My brothers are destroying this city as we speak. We have to go now, or you’ll be killed!”

“Get away from me! I’d rather die!”

I grabbed her. She was small and easy to contain. I lifted her over my shoulder, and she beat me as I carried her down the stairs, through the studio, and out onto the streets.

She screamed for help. So I gagged and tied her with sackcloth.

I took the back alleys and least-crowded streets and fled the city as quickly as possible, making sure that neither I nor Dina’s bound body touched a thing. She cried, but her voice was muffled by her gag.

“I know you think I’m cruel,” I said. “But I do this for your own good. I’ve figured it out, Dina. I know what you are. Whereas I am the sunderer of cities, you are their genesis. Your songs, your visions, your dreams—they are the impetus that creates new ones. I destroy cities with my touch. You create them with your song. We are kindred. If you die, then in a way, so do I.”

I found a black horse tied up beside a tent on the outskirts of the city and stole it before its owner could stop us. I spread Dina before me, and we rode deep into the desert. After several hours, she stopped struggling, so I took off her gag.

“Water…” she mumbled.

I found a canteen slung around the horse and gave it to her.

After drinking several large gulps, she said, “My family, friends, my paintings. Will they all vanish?”

“I’m sorry. But you can create new ones.”

“Do you think it’s that easy, that I can just start over in a new city, as if nothing at all has happened? Everything I know is going to die.”

The horse grew tired as the sun set behind a dune, so I dismounted. I untied her hands as the stars winked to life above us.

“If you flee,” I said, “by the time you get back to your city, it will be dust. No one will remember it, not even you.”

“Won’t I vanish too?” she said. “I was born in that city.”

“I erased your father. It changed you, but you were born again as someone else. I think you are a seed that can’t be destroyed.”

“Then why bring me all the way out here?”

I looked at her and realized that I didn’t have an answer.

“When I was six my mother bought me my first paint set. My father took me to the top of Jimn Mountain when I was nine. I remember the first time I kissed a boy. I remember breaking my arm when I tried to scale Dell Wall. All of that will be erased, won’t it?”

“But you will rebuild it somewhere else, in some other time.”

“You don’t understand! Humans are not like a wall, where the bricks of our experiences are interchangeable. Each instant is precious, unique. You rob the universe of the sacred. Can’t you see that?”

“I … I have known nothing else,” I said. “Until I met you.”

“Is that consolation for ruining my life, that the ghost of annihilation has second thoughts?”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“But you have.”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“What wasn’t?” she said slowly.

“The destruction of your city.”

“What city?”

“Gelecek.”

“What a beautiful name,” she said. “Where is it? And who are you? How did I get here?”

I sighed and had to look away.

“I feel funny,” she said. “As if … I’m not supposed to be here. My body feels … light. Like air. What’s your name?”

“My name?” I said. “My name is … Destruction.”

When I looked for her again, there was only sand. The girl, the horse, everything was gone, even my suit of flesh. I cried out to the stars, but they did not respond.

I did not move from that spot. My brothers came to me on the sand. They said, “Come back to the Jeen with us, Brother, for you have no reason to dwell among form now.”

And I said, “Leave me.”

The sun rose and set a hundred times, and my brothers came to me again and again. “Please,” they begged. “It’s not proper that you be apart from us. Come and obliterate a city with us and feel your old self again.”

But how could I? In each city might dwell the spark of Agna or Dina or her kin. I could not bear to erase her from existence again.

“Go away,” I told my brothers, and they did.

I sat there in the same spot of sand where Dina had disappeared, while the sun turned in slow orbits overhead. I felt like a top, spinning, spinning, but never slowing.

The stars and sun turned through slow aeons, and still I did not move. One silent afternoon, a dark cloud appeared in the sky. Once in a hundred years it rained in the desert; today it poured down in great sheets. The sky grew as dark as the gloaming, and the sands turned to mud. Forks of light split the sky in dreadful thunder.

I collected myself into human form, gave myself strong arms and hands, and began to mold the wet sand into a brick. The pounding rain seemed to shout Agna’s songs across the desert, and to their tunes I crafted another brick, and then another, fashioning them into a rudimentary wall. I knew it was temporary. I knew that tomorrow, when the sun rose hot and burdensome above the sands, my wall would grow weak. The desert winds would topple it in time, that all was, essentially, nothing. But heaven help me, I couldn’t stop.