Eden

Six

I look more closely at the walls. Something about them seems unusual. They are big, but I don't realise quite how big until I notice something tiny moving next to them. I watch, wondering what it is, and after a moment I realize it's a person. Once I realize that, I finally begin to see everything at its proper scale. The walls are huge, as high as tall buildings, two or three hundred meters high, it seems like, guessing from the size of that person. The walls are huge, and set into them is a tall, narrow gateway which seems to reach a third of the way to the wall's top. Inside the gateway are two metal gates, which open from the middle like solid doors, and which must be huge, as well. The gates are made of metal, from what I can see, but metal which is scarred and cracked and smeared with soot. The gateway stands open, I notice, and I can't imagine the machinery that would be needed to open and close it. I look, and think, and actually start wondering, a little nervously, what such huge gates and walls are actually for, and what they are there to repel.

I think about that, and look behind me, slightly uncertainly, worried at what I might see.

I look, but I see nothing. There's nothing behind me except the building I just came out of.

Not merely nothing interesting. Nothing at all. Or rather, nothing I see. Nothing I remember seeing.

It's a very particular kind of nothing, and I don't really think about it very much right then, and truthfully, I still don't understand this either, but whatever that nothing is, it stops you thinking about why you can't see it. You just look, and then look away, and forget you'd looked in the first place.

Which is what I do now.

I glance around, curious, and then I look back towards the city without quite noticing that I've been distracted. Mostly, I'm simply disinterested in what's behind me, and looking elsewhere, and thinking back, I'm fairly sure the girl beside me does the same thing. I'm fairly sure I see her look back, and then look away, too.

We both keep looking at the city, anyway. I start squinting, trying to see what it is at the very top of it. There's some kind of bright light in a tower on top of the highest hill, I think, which is another thing I can't properly see.

Later, I learn what it is. At the centre of the city, in a temple at the highest point, there is a glowing light which is in some way holy. Later, I'm told that this is the Ark, the Chalice, and the Dreaming Mind of God, and that it isn't really mysterious as such, just that normal people, people like me, can't understand it, or see it properly. That we are like bugs looking up at flying airplanes, or butterflies looking into a night sky. Which to me, still seems fairly mysterious, but I suppose you get used to things like that here. The point is that whatever it is in that temple is real, and is actually there, but that our eyes just see shapes and patterns and lights which mean nothing to our minds, and so whatever it is just slips from our attention, and we stop thinking about it, and look at other things instead, without really noticing that we are.

Exactly as I am doing right now.

Instead of the light at the top of the city, and the nothingness behind me, I look back at the city's immense walls. I look at the gates. I look at the road down to that gateway, thinking.

The road we're standing on runs down a slight slope to a bridge, and then across that bridge to the city gates. I assume we're going to go that way, since the city is the obvious place to go, so I peer at the bridge, trying to see it properly. In front of the city walls there is a moat or river, which the bridge runs across. I river, I think, but I can't quite see clearly. The water is moving, though, dark and oily and swirling. It looks fast, terribly fast, and has ripples and eddies, but there is not a trace of froth on the surface, and not a single piece of floating rubbish. And that, quite honestly, seems a little odd, too.