315. Colours of earth, 7

(Rose)

We reached the sea again. A dead spread megalopolis is stretched like a mineral forest along the coast, and well inside the bay, for kilometres of shallow water. Maybe half the city, of what we can see, is deep under water. It could be more, if it were more residential areas nearing the sea in the past, beyond the last towers still reaching the surface of the waves today.

It actually makes a sumptuous landscape at dusk.

The buildings still have some shining parts, reflecting the last lights of the sun over the sea.

Hard to say, but maybe it actually is our destination.

Hard to say from the distance and obvious changes time brought.

We'll venture into the ruins of the city and look for clues.

Ana flew ahead to hunt something that would become her lunch. Probably another small seagull.

Bleue and I follow a road on our side that clues us on how much the landscape was shattered.

The once continuous and straight road has been thrown away in pieces, as if a giant pipe of gaz below it had pushed all of it away, while turning on angles on itself, while blowing up all along.

Well that's the least stupid explanation we can make for how a road turned into what we're climbing around now.

There's no more road. We follow a dirt path that slithered between rifts and hills, showing scattered wrecks and fragments of road that generally seems to head toward the city.

Hills of rubbles surround us, gradually turned into normal hills by the grass and shrubs now growing over them.

We reach the outskirts of the rubbles fields that become the remaining standing buildings of this immense coastal city.

~

We camp for the night in a building on this frontier between completely collapsed ruins and mostly standing abandoned ruins. We're close to two of these wide fissures in the ground that run around the area randomly, like rifts from earthquakes. They're a little random in pattern so I can't say for sure what caused them and when.

Ana is dozing off on the shoulder pads.

Bleue took off and went ahead. She's gathering dusty cardboards and pieces of wood to burn.

I open a can over our main cooking dish. Some molten old meat falls into the casserole and begins to heat over the fire. I add water and stir it.

Ana sheds a few big feathers in a tremor, dreaming about something.

Bleue immediately recovers them. Her dress of dark bluish feathers almost has her first layer completed. This clothing will be interesting to see and use once completed. It will look like a refined form of fur I think.

Ana can only produce and spare a limited number of feathers however, so it takes patience. I think it will look good.

So good in fact that I wonder why noble and rich coats in our times didn't have more feathers on them. It was a given for hats and theatre masks, but I don't recall seeing any dress of feathers ever.

It's funny how tonight it's a thought about our old world that puzzles me at being the odd one. That's rare.

We sleep, and also somewhat rare, it is for me a night without nightmares nor unsettling dreams I could remember.

Bleue slept well too.

We see Ana stretching her fingers, in order to walk on the ground without hurting her talons. She then walks like a normal crow. It seems it takes her an abnormal level of strength and focus to open her talons or feet in such a way that lets her walk. It's the complete opposite of us who need strength to close our hands into fists.

She walks around the floor of the level we're in, discovering this new environment that has a roof. A real roof, or ceiling rather, covering the entire level of this industrial building.

Morning light is reaching us through the openings that are the missing windows.

We didn't notice yesterday, but now that we see that, I feel a nostalgic shiver.

Bleue is gawking at the morning lights. She feels the same thing.

We smile at each other quietly.

The world outside is all ours to enjoy.

~

We venture in what still remains a magnificent city to this day. Despite the wrecks and collapsed streets, and collapsed blocks of buildings. Despite the channels of mud that cross the city as if they'd always been there, the burnt areas, the crevices that appear bottomless at first sight, and the exploded crater of a hill, that left only jagged rocks scattered around. Despite all that and more, it still visibly was an incredibly rich land, with varied architectures from all over the world and all over time. There are colourful constructions of all kinds of cultures, so varied already in the past that it's even harder to tell what is what today. There's a molten complexity of culture and history that perspire from every stone and building standing.

Every wall is now an art piece, mixture of differently old construct and architecture, now blend with random brush strokes of decay and effects of time. Age gives a richness to everything, as they used to say when I was young. It's so true.

The styles of the two sides of the continents that used to meet around here still share their sensibilities. And now they combine with the effects of the two worlds, past and present, colliding and mixing silently.

It's a frozen firework of stones, clays, bricks, marbles, ceramics, enamels, metals, glasses, plastics, concretes, rusts, dirt, plants, waters, oils, muds and rubbers.

Everything in here and around is in a complete boiling mixture, it's impossible to discern clearly what the past order could ever have been anymore.

It's an overwhelming land and a monument to humanity left to wither into a pot-pourri.

It's putting the dried wonders of the older land, really a city of wonders, into the new precious case decorated with random deconstruction and aging of the landscape, with all the natural beauties it can bring and hold.

It makes a lot of beauty to witness. It's a feast for the eyes we can't digest in a day...

We get our fill so fast, we overflow...

Every block of the city, every street, even every crevice and sinkhole of a building; is a world class museum of colours, forms, and archaeological leftovers of culture and historical wonders.

And every unlikely section of this area that is now bizarrely laid out. It's like looking at an entire museum worth of paintings thrown over each other, overlapping each other randomly, everywhere you can look.

And this city is wide enough that it lingers over the horizon...

We could live here for years and still be unable to see it all.

B - Should we then? We could settle ourselves over a hill. Build a house... Grow some rosmarinus...

She didn't say it; but I guessed what the next step she has in mind would have been.

Thank you for not saying it.

I'm looking in the general direction she's pointing at.

Settling here...

Well it is the most magnificent area we've encountered, by an unfairly wide lead.

And there are visibly birds flying around, meaning there must be plenty of fishes as well in the bay.

The land is fertile as there are sparse forests south and south east slowly catching up over the rubbles, where the mountainous region begins. It seems to be going similarly on the north western edges we're very far away from.

And best of all, we don't feel any putrid aura nor any malevolent daiûa intent in the air.

It's ideal... We'll just need to boil and distillate sea water if we can't find a clean spring, or a hidden river with fresh water. There's a fair chance there is one somewhere, so it's the only small inconvenience I can find.

Should we?

In this land of art and history museums covering every spot of the earth...

R - Well... Why not?

We don't really have anywhere else to go, and here sure is beautiful.

We may not stay there forever; but we can settle around this area for a while.

We'll see how we do.

And we've been unable to figure out if it was Istanbul, but for the sake of it, we'll say it was.

We hardly can imagine a city looking more impressive anyway. It wasn't nicknamed the queen of cities for nothing.

R - Alright then. Let's settle in this area for a time. We can stop being nomads for a while, I think you're right.

B - Yes! Maybe it won't be for fifty years, but it could be really nice to live here for now... Let's build ourselves a place that can last and see how living together here goes.

R - It's agreed.

We share a kiss. For the first time in a while.

B - You have a few grey hair there.

R - You're not getting younger either...

More than the teasing, we have to stop and think for a fair moment to figure out how old we are.

It takes more complex calculations and leaps of logic than it usually would...

Each time I was resurrected, my body was new technically, but already adult. And it sensibly kept aging at a normal rate at the very least. The last times my body was renewed, I can tell it also kept some memory of this aging. Was it real or just my imagination though?

R - So... Assuming I kept aging normally since I arrived, and you as well... from how old we were in Summer 1925... We can theorize that... I'm about 32 now, and you... Oh but since you arrived a few years later, there's a wider age gap between us than before...

B - You're around thirty and I'm around twenty. Close enough. À une vache près hein? Good enough for me!

What did she say? Bleue is laughing. Ana as well? Okay I give up.

True, it didn't matter really much to begin with.

We begin to look around in the distance toward the shrubs covered hills in the distance, where we might choose to settle.

~