In the Rememdium Edificium a boy sleeps, rests, heals. At his bedside crouches a friend, a man with white-blond curls inexpertly cropped, head lowered to the blankets such that the sleeping boy's hand might rest lightly upon the man's scarred brow.
The boy dreams.
He soars high above everything, land stretching in every direction to the blue distance where ice-capped give way to verdant forests, then a broad valley, countless herd beasts roaming like cloud-shadow across the fertile plain. He moves on balmy winds and the world slowly turns beneath him; sinuous threads blaze like precious metal, rivers catching the low-hanging sun as it circles but never sets, while a single star hangs pale and unmoving in the deep blue vault above. A similar speck draws his eye below, a mote of silver-white brilliance moving slowly, inexorably, towards a smudge yet further ahead, a darker spot that spreads and grows even as he draws closer. A settlement, a village, a town, stout walls and sward roofs, hair-fine strands of sweet woodsmoke rising from clustered hearths and firepits. The settlement grows slowly, gradually, noticeable only if he looks away for a time to follow the track of that silver speck; when he looks back timber constructions have hardened to shells of rough stone, narrow dirt roads stretching out from the town to smaller settlements scattered across the wide valley.
That gleaming spark reaches the gates at last. It crosses the threshold and the change is sudden, abrupt: the town surges, seethes, details shifting and changing faster than he can follow as buildings rise and fall and rise higher yet; the only fixed point is that gleaming spark in the centre, bright and constant as the pole star hanging overhead. The settlement spreads ever wider as streets shift and writhe, hardening from dirt to cobbles to flagstones, a web that pulses with constant life; sturdy walls form brief boundaries that are swiftly exceeded, left embedded in the town's fabric like rings in a felled tree, a map of unstoppable growth, of progress. The roads beyond the gates widen, thicken into broad paved arteries that pour prosperity into the burgeoning city's veins.
It's at the heart that the first gleam of marble appears, a flash of white amid the dark granite from which the city had grown; the silver spark rests on a square of velvet green, a garden dotted with trees and strewn with drifts of vibrant blooms, sheltered behind gleaming walls and colonnades. Graceful towers and domes of burnished gold strive upwards, while the palace itself sprawls out to engulf the districts around it, streets and alleyways subsumed into a maze of airy courtyards and sheltered arcades; the wider city brightens in turn, a mesh of broad avenues and stately boulevards leading inwards to that shining point at the centre. He lifts his eyes and sees this change echoed in the surrounding countryside, a patchwork of golden grainfields and lush meadows; even the lesser towns prosper as the roads swell with wealth beyond measure, carried in a tide to the City's gates. Looking down again and the palace is almost a city in itself, a froth of spires and arches washed in gold by the low-swinging sun. Even from his high vantage he can hear the distant peals of temple bells, countless joyous voices wafting up to him like sweet incense.
The palace grows deeper, more intricate, layer upon layer, an ever greater profusion of gilt and marble, more domes, more towers, more clustered columns and glittering fountains. Once-spacious courtyards grow cramped and shadowed, closed in on all sides by looming walls and spires that crowd out the sky; even that central garden shrinks inwards, a sacred space nibbled at every edge by walls that once sought to reflect the spark that dwelt there and now try to contain it, a shrine become a prison.
Chaotic, unconstrained, the gilded palace grows ravenous, impatient; the chimes and choirsong fade to be replaced by battle-drums and brazen horns as armies crawl out across the land, taking by the sword what was once gladly offered in tribute. Far out at first and yet ever closer the distant towns and cities fall, each replaced by a pillar of black and bitter smoke. Even this is not enough, and the hungering citadel consumes that which once nourished it, district after district darkening and falling into drab disrepair as the city withers to sustain the roiling tumour at its heart. A prideful clot of white and gold atop a pool of rotting filth, the citadel turns away from the world, outer windows blocked and blinded as it looks only inward. The outer city decays, thin wails of despair rising on air grown cheerless and cold, and the distant ice-tipped mountains seem to draw nearer, a ring of gleaming teeth around the horizon.
The biting breath of mountain winds stir something within the city, in the last scrap of green at its heart. The star-bright mote moves again, exploring the garden-prison, at first with slow and aimless meanderings, then with increasing determination, purpose; it finds its way into the palace, a frail and silvery glow lighting the windows from within as it roams the endless halls and chambers, searching. At last it makes its way to the citadel gates, vast portals of gilded iron that spring wide, and a cold and brilliant radiance blazes as the wanderer descends into the blighted slums below.
What follows is uncertain, as he finds himself buffeted and battered by clawing gusts that drive him up and away from the Golden City. Even so he hears clearly, cannot help but hear the dreadful howl that goes up from below, vast and deep and baleful as of the tolling of a great and terrible bell. The clustered spires of marble lurch and sway as the city burns and bleeds, proud buildings licked by tongues of fire, paved streets and squares awash in lurid crimson.
Far overhead the sky grows midnight-blue and is filled with countless pitiless stars that reel and spin and tremble at that cry; their breath is bleak damnation poured out upon the land, upon the city, and the valley blanches at its cold caress. What was green now fades and withers, silvered rivers shocked and frozen white, and the city lies dark and dead and cold. The sun sinks ever lower to the horizon, dipping below the serried mountain peaks, sending jagged fangs of shadow to rake across the plain. From every side loom encircling walls of glacial ice, closing in to gnash and gnaw the city's marble bones.
Mirth wells up in his throat like harsh black bile, to see such proud vainglory fall and fade; he laughs a long and croaking cry, and the bitter winds whisk him swiftly away.
The boy wakes in the pallid light of dawn with that laugh still on his lips; quickly lost, though, as it tugs upon his scarred lung and wracks his thin frame with hacking coughs.