The Fifth Quarter

 

A long time ago, I posted this. The idea continues to percolate.

A city, divided into four by high walls patrolled by ancient servitors of the "geteit chemosit" type. The city itself gives the appearance of vast age, as though it was constructed long before any of its current inhabitants found it; it is a landscape not of individual houses, but of tenements, towers, spires and domes. 

In the First Quarter ("A"), it is always night and always spring; there is just enough warm for life to exist beneath its cold stars and moon-lit clouds. The buildings are mostly mere shells, nearly subsumed within the fungal forest which slowly creeps up from below; the fungus itself is food for the blind sverfneblin whose ancestors excavated a city of caves beneath the First Quarter's surface. What humans lurk in the ruins are outcasts only - lepers, vagrants, vagabonds and poets - who take advantage of the darkness to shelter from the eyes of the world. 

In the Second Quarter ("B"), it is always dawn and always spring; its piquant chill hints that a warm afternoon is coming - though the afternoon never quite arrives. Its rulers are vodyanoi boyars, an extended clan of which each inhabits a single dark pool; these are all connected by frigid canals filled with leeches, slithering eels, and gigantic slow-moving carp. The human population of this quarter form a society in parallel, traversing the waterways in high bridges and walkways, and warning their children to never descend to the ground lest the vodyanoi take them.

In the Third Quarter ("C"), it is always dawn and always winter; dew lies frosted on every surface, and the red sun smoulders in a pale blue sky without warmth. Its ruler is a wereraven pfalzgraf and his family and courtiers; the human inhabitants are serfs whose very fates he owns. They eke out a living from rooftop gardens and allotments on their tenement buildings, where plants can absorb enough light from the continual dawn-light to grow and nourish their growers. 

In the Fourth Quarter ("D") it is always night and always winter. The quarter is encased in ice that lies many metres thick; only the highest towers and spires penetrate its surface. What lies beneath the ice, burrowing through the frigid dark, few indeed can say; the towers are the home of mages, necromancers, witches and worse. 

The Fifth Quarter, not marked on the map, is an island in the middle of the river that lies - frozen for the most part - in the centre of the city, where each of the other four quarters meets. The island contains a single tall, square building that, it is said, used to serve as the citadel of the city's rulers when once it had them. The building itself is divided into four segments, one corresponding to each of the city's four parts, and beneath are the labyrinthine tombs which those ancient rulers constructed for themselves in the end times of their dominion...

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