I begged him until he took me, and so it was that father and I descended from the mountains toward the city with our wares to sell; I beholding it for the first time with other-than imagination, and father, experienced, warning that we shalln’t venture further than the perimeter.
But even such was exhilaration for me.
To see the citizens in their marvelous foreigninity! passing by us, looking at us, oh Gods!
“I cannot believe,” I whispered to father, “the city materialized one day from nowhere, fully formed.”
“Not from nowhere—from the future,” he said.
“Is it true…” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“And time still lives within?”
“In the crux.”
I could see it looming in the distance, like a great cleft in the sky.
I noticed then a few of father’s hairs turn grey, and felt a kind of jolt of accelerated maturation in myself.
“No further,” father said, and we stopped.
The deeper into the city one ventures, the further in time, until, surrounded by the elderdead, one too succumbs to age, I told my son, as we both stood gazing into, and again I thought, What it must be like to know what they know who leave behind to progress, and expire knowingly, ever-closer to time’s end.