Prelude: Nessantico
IF A CITY CAN HAVE a gender,
Nessantico was female . . .
She had experienced
the flowering of all her promise and her beauty during the long
reign of Kraljica Marguerite. In that magnificent half century,
Nessantico’s long childhood and even longer adolescence culminated
in mingled elegance and power, unmatched anywhere in the known
world. For fifty years, she brooked no peer. For fifty years, she
believed that this glorious present would be eternal, that her
ascent would—no, must—continue.
Her superiority was
ordained. It was destined. It would last forever.
It would
not.
Kraljica Marguerite,
like all those who ruled within Nessantico’s confines, was human
and mortal; Marguerite’s son Justi and then Justi’s son Audric,
both of whom inherited the Sun Throne, didn’t possess Marguerite’s
gifts. Without Marguerite’s strong guidance, without her guile and
her wisdom, Nessantico’s flowering was sadly short-lived. The
blossom of Marguerite’s promise withered and died in far less time
than it had taken it to bloom.
Worse, rivals rose to
challenge Nessantico. Firenzcia betrayed her: Firenzcia, the
brother city who had always envied her; Firenzcia, who had always
been her companion, her strength, her shield, and her sword.
Firenzcia left her to form its own empire.
And from the unknown
west strode a new, harsher challenge: an alien, unguessed empire as
strong as Nessantico herself. Stronger, perhaps; for the
Tehuantin—as they were called—not only ripped away Nessantico’s
hold on their shores, but sent an army over the sea to plunder and
rape and destroy the cities of the Holdings and to shatter the
walls of Nessantico herself.
The assault left
Nessantico shaken and afraid. She was stained by the soot of
magical fire and twice trampled by the boots of foreign soldiers:
first the Tehuantin, then the Firenzcians. The architectural beauty
of her buildings morphed into toppled columns, broken domes, and
roofless husks. The A’Sele was clogged with bodies and
refuse.
Nessantico . . . she
was a woman exhausted by her struggles, worn by her cares, and
clothed in the shredded tatters of her old supremacy. Her sense of
security and inevitability was lost, perhaps—she feared—forever.
The smell still lingered in her streets: a malodorous stench of
rotting flesh, blood, and ash.
A lesser entity would
have collapsed. A lesser entity might have looked at her sad
reflection in the fouled waters of the River A’Sele and seen a
skeletal death mask staring back. A lesser entity would have given
up and ceded her supremacy to Firenzcia or to the unglimpsed cities
of the Tehuantin.
Not her.
Not
Nessantico.
She gathered the
tatters around herself. She drew herself up and cleansed herself as
best she could. She cloaked herself in pride and memories and
belief, and vowed that one day, one day, the rest of the world
would again bow to her.
One day . .
.
But not yet
today.