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There is a golden city on the edges of the cerulean coast, a city who curves velvet covers in its violent sleep and spills its emerald guts sideways along diagonal rails of silver shimmering valor.
Glass puppets hang from glass ceilings in this city, shards of glossy rain falling from blue clouds in white panels. The streetlights drip these glass colors pink and green onto the shoulders of men who do not wear watches today, a contract of King Wittica's aesthetic parallel.
The streets breathe through Etoria's golden ducts and steel-grated manholes, and grey dogged fog that reeks of watermelon scent eats the airs of sound here. Light is filtered through honey and chemical dust, lavender and lime and peach mamoy. There is no fear to be found in the bustles of clustered air, naught but appetite, jazzy rhythm, and the glass cups of fervent colors. The clip-clop of horses, the sandstone highs, and the tramlines run down the stairstreets in spiraling dust, concrete paths diagonally forced to share the road with pre-historic lifeforms of track.
Lifetimes have lived in the darling streets of golden Etoria.
In the clumping air, there are statues- people that stand still upon high rooftops that flicker flames of dewdrop sweat on slanted rooftops. Two, to be exact. The one on the right wears a deep yellow coat with many sleeves. The garment flares as a waving flag in golden Etoria, the kingless world that has no rule to declare wars or push political symbols. Her hair is combed to both sides but rises with the wind in exposé, puffing up and down like a merry-go-round. Her eyes are as clear as the gorgeous fountainwater below. Her boots, fastened with black cords, edge closer towards the ending of the roof. In one of their pockets, there carries the sheath of a hidden instrument, a weapon of some kind.
Next to her, arms folded, a boy leans. He wears long tan slacks that cinch high at the ribs and vanish beneath a low, knitted sweater that reads in slanted dialect: property of the third hour. He has glasses that catch every rose and emerald light with just the right incorrectness to paint a brown and gray mask over his face , a misjudge of the angle casting the rest of him in green sheens, and purple stains.
His pinky is elevated, stretched toward the skyline. He chews a sort of gum, mumbling over some stickiness he didn't pay for. A book bag hangs from one arm but nothing about him seems burdened. His shoes are polished. His socks do not match. A dangling greatsword earring falls to his shoulder, too much slack in the chain that holds it. He grins with greenlights, the dimples of his face making a constellation of his facial asymmetry.
A ratil-cart sings past with two passengers and several coats of graffiti, its silver edges almost spared from iccil spit markings. Wires pull themselves across balconies, and crows line up to hear the air announcements, no longer singing in tune with the wind chime trains. A vendor burns a flyer and sends it high to the sky in blessing. The festival preparations continue. Paper wings fall from the roofs, some of them land in open mouths, some eaten on purpose. A boy's photograph stares from every public screen. A monarch with white hair of ironed snow, golden eyes that split the camera with blue irises, decadent sweat on his temple. A face without origin, watching from the machines. No words are printed with him. No warnings yet speak, none but only the image of godly divine boys.
In that delegated silence, the girl decides to speak. Her voice is brittle with withheld thunder, nothing audible to the street view above. The other boy grins. Below them, a coin disappears from a blind man's collection. Paint appears on the statue's heel in the shape of a crawling fish. The boy's pinky shifts. A bird forgets how to land, a derelict bird confused by its own misstep. A bag of sweets unstitches itself and flies into the dark. The pair slide down a drainpipe that seemed rusted through, but was instead painted that maroonish shade of taint, fooling all those who have not yet tried to slide down it. The girl's yellow coat catches the sun, making blue lights and bursting flavors of colorfu sensation. The bookbag catches the wind. The ground does not catch the dastardly two, those menaces of justice and kindest valor.
The sky is orange. The sun is green. No one points up to the sky, nor to the duo of thieves above. The city's dialect falls from balconies, thick and broken, syllables sharpened by hunger, lengthened by joy. "Gaedriel's weight to you," says a man selling fruit knives, not because he knows who they are, but because everyone says something when they pass. "Shine you twice, stay lucky," says an ugly blonde child to an uglier pigeon. Words come out fast here, loose at the ends, polite only in rhythm. The street coughs them up in regurgitated dust. They land beside a rust-colored tram stalled at a crooked junction with the crunch of clapping heels. The crowd moves around it without care. Women with velvet gloves balance trays of oilpaper desserts. Children kick marbles that change weight when thrown. Every wall is peeled and written on. Old glue peeks from beneath the new flyers. The two walk in diagonals. There are no straight paths in downtown Etoria, a result of Wittica's superstition.
The messy glasses boy flicks his pinkie. A pair of goggles detaches from a vendor's hook and drifts toward him, slow and sideways, bouncing off a balloon string. The vendor sees, does not care. Too much to watch. Too much to count. Too many hands that do not connect to arms, and the green club on the boy's arm means that there isn't much the vendor can do.
The green club boy passes the goggles to his companion. She shakes her head. He shrugs.
Beneath their boots, the sidewalk clicks. The concrete has scales and climbs up the greenery walls. A fluted siren croaks twice from the eastern end in rehearsal. The festival has not yet begun. The city prepares itself in polishings from the inside. Trolleys full of colored ink are pushed by city-sleeved youth. Vendors rewire stall-lights using black-toothed clamps. A string of prayer-sheets unwinds from an overhead wire and drapes across the limbs of the crowd. One catches the pinky boy's ear, tangled around the greatsword earring. He fails to notice, and so, doesn't remove it.
The coins passed around between the native-hands are diametric bead-glass. Shards of copper and red-orange melted smooth, passed between fingers, weighed by feel, valued by color. The pinky boy tosses one to a man with a mouth full of string in exchange for some string of his own. The girl pockets three. The boy eats his string with grinning teeth, having spat out his disgusting gum to the ichorous pavement. A toothier boy next to the stand offers a ticket folded from kelp and powder. The girl inspects it.
'If the symbols were dry, this would be a proper fortune. It's half-done,' she thinks to herself. The symbols are still wet. She hands it back. Paint dries on their coats as they walk. The rain is sticky today.
They pass under a bridge where two lovers are building a temporary chandelier. It is made of shoelaces and cutlery. When the wind blows, it rings. A police automaton stops beside them. Its face is paper. A question is printed. Pinky boy flicks the pinkie. The automaton forgets what it asked and turns to admire the chandelier. The blonde girl's hand tightens once, then releases.
They walk further. Past a fountain with hands carved where spouts should be. Past a bakery with no walls and ten ovens pointed outward. Past an arcade where the machines are held together with prayer-ropes and wet ash. No one mentions the image on the screens: the white-haired boy with the unfinished stare. The sweat on his temple. The sun turns slightly bluer, the light downcast more green. A wind rises from the holes in the pavement and brings the scent of fireless dye, gelatin smog, and fried clay. The two pause on the edge of a mural being repainted. The boy dips a finger in the green. He draws a spiral on the statue's toe. A spark dances along the edge of his pinkie. It pulls upward, bends the wet line of paint toward the sky. The artist behind him gasps. The paint continues to rise, curl, then scatter. The statue is improved. The girl says nothing, but, her foot brushes the edge of the glyph.
A flyer flutters past. Its headline is stamped with a sun-shaped hole.
"THE CHURCHES' PARADSE: BE CLEAN, BE SEEN, BE FORGIVEN."
The two vanish down the next street, laughing at the broken typos.
In a different part of town, a woman brushes a black scarf past her long red hair. Her wide cloak covers most of her body in the dense snow and wooden trees, but the orange lights set in the trails catch glint of her axe, glinting scarlet in the nightly day. She drags the weapon behind her, inching closer to the dark of the woods. Everything flickers in the sun, and down the path of a high grassy cliff, surrounded by earth and green and with no city to be found, a boy in clothing sits, eating a ham sandwich. He stretches his hand out, placing that green sun in the center of his fingers. He laughs, staring at that spectacle thing, taking a good bite and laughing in the face of that daring orange sky.
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