There are cablecars down from the mountains, between the mountains, over the soaring mountaintop lakes that mirror the skies. Highways through the sky, or a net holding up the sky. There is snow here amidst the living-dying grass, crystal trickles of water clearer than air and colder than life. Here the mud crystallizes and the dirt sloughs away as something pure organizes the silt away. Expanding and contracting, like breathing, leaving dirt roads a ruin. The water excavates, carving away buried boulders and stone, and then carving away their impurities. It's steep, especially when the rains come and those trickles become streams and the mountainside path becomes a muddy waterfall and entire sections of hill come away underneath your feet. You sleep in cold and huddled tents, soaked through with water and dirt and it feels like you'll never be dry again. Dinner comes from cans, though rationing is a long way off. 

In the shadows of the storm, and in the flashes of lightning, you see the silhouetted shapes of snow machines on clean cut hills. You see the outlines of rocks heroic. You came a long way to see those rocks. Not grand or monumental, not made to commemorate wars or kings, but they're here when nothing else is, and you have to respect that.

The next shape to resolve is the museums, the castles, the communications hubs. Thick grey concrete discs built around mountains in rings and layers, like retrofitted pyramid steps, like bunkers with a view. Glass windows and satellite dishes and display benches with maps and geodes and layers of inert text. They provide shelter, not from the rain but in being a part of a world where it hasn't rained for ten years. There are yellow flowers here and a bicycle path that will lead forever on out through the rises and falls.

This stage of the journey is between mountains primordial and mountains with purpose, the borderline between snow and artificial snow. What do you take with you, and what stays behind?

*

[b]Dyssia![/b]

The streets of Irassia are a distraction.

When one assembles a society entirely of those who are best at their arts, each of their arts demands that you bend to them. Flasks beyond compare, interwoven with engraved opals and corals, glass or lead, are laid out on dozens of benches and tables. No charge - money is not relevant here - just take whatever suits as your reward for passing this master on the streets. A storyteller sits atop a water fountain and theorizes about new kinds of girls and the gnomic poetry of their relationships, loves and battles. An orator beats her chest and roars her condemnation of her rival above the crowd, embedding the righteousness of her cause with the power of her rhetoric. There is a little bit of everything here, and it is happening all of the time.

But the worst delay is threatened by a Guardian. Glorious in a blue that might make you blush, she has set up occupation of a key bridge, surrounded by squires and attendants, and none may pass. Guardians often occupy such key points and deny anyone from crossing as part of their training. It is a provoking gesture - fight her, perhaps, or trick her, seduce her, evade the fire of her antiaircraft weaponry by flying over the chasm. Or sit down and wait four to eight hours for her to leave, or take an hour roundabout course along a different path and hope it is not also blocked. This is normal and expected and is part of Azura city life, but you are trying to get somewhere [i]on time[/i]. How do you deal?