Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The City Sanguinary, Sempiternal, Vast—
    The City Sanguinary, Sempiternal, Vast—
    The City Sanguinary, Sempiternal, Vast—
    Ebook93 pages1 hour

    The City Sanguinary, Sempiternal, Vast—

    By Merenel Brae

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A young clerk from a humble background believes his technologically-advanced and cultured society to be the utopia it seems, but through a series of mysterious and inexplicable encounters he begins to doubt the foundations of his world, and is forced to confront his place in it. Inspired by the works of Jules Verne and Ursula K. Le Guin, in an especial homage to James Thomson's 1873 poem, "The City of Dreadful Night." 

     

    DETAILS & WARNINGS: 22,000 words; some consensual sexual activity (non-explicit); atmospheric horror; refrerences to political violence.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGolden Thorn Press
    Release dateAug 13, 2020
    ISBN9781393208914
    The City Sanguinary, Sempiternal, Vast—
    Author

    Merenel Brae

    Merenel Brae early in life encountered the work of Jules Verne and the Eleanors, Cameron and Farjeon, igniting a love of passionate, personality-driven tales filled with poetry and a mighty sense of wonder. They are not really a blue-haired sea elf roaming a desert land, but close enough.

    Related to The City Sanguinary, Sempiternal, Vast—

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Two Poems by Joseph Brodsky

      May 12, 2020

      Two Poems by Joseph Brodsky
      7 min read

    • Article

      Late Constable Review – A Thrilling Enigma

      Oct 31, 2021

      A hard rain falls on a glittering grey sea. Wind harries sullen clouds across low-lying horizons. Overcast skies shed a pale glare on the churned earth below. Thunder and gloom, turbid brown rivers, corn standing solid as a wall at the field’s edge b

      4 min read

    • Article

      Air Rights

      Nov 1, 2020

      The French Church—never much on looks, red brick leaningin the direction of Romanesque—settled into modest circumstanceshow many decades on West 16th?Nothing divine in the details,veneer peeling from doors nevermeant for here, never open. No light,ev

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 1, 2021

      The light from the full moon lent a silky, glacial sheen to the towering front of the cloud, which stretched off to the horizon in both directions. I stood transfixed as it made its way down the street toward me at a little over the town’s speed limi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Apparition

      Mar 26, 2020

      Apparition
      8 min read

    • Article

      Hook, Line And Sinker

      Oct 18, 2018

      Hook, Line And Sinker
      4 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 2, 2019

      Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulf-stream of winter, nearer the shores of spring. —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, February 2, 1854 [T]he pure luxury of a cloudless sky designed not to

      4 min read

    • Article

      Adrift in Sunlit Night

      Jun 1, 2020

      Adrift in Sunlit Night
      20 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Sep 4, 2018

      In London. England. Who knows why?Perhaps this rumpled guyFrom central casting or a page of Dickens.He’s taking ordinary usTo haunts of the illustrious,Where even dull pulse quickens. A red felt hat’s dark fingered brim,Food-spotted vest are—him.A mo

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 1, 2022

      Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. —Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” tr. by Clare C

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Island (catullus 64)

      Mar 1, 2022

      Back then the evergreens tumbled downriverfrom the glaze-white runoff to the boot-stirred puddlesof amber young men who fulfilled our destiny,who clambered into ships, on horses, and in wagonspainting the newfound landscapes ours.Our calling was nobl

      9 min read

    • Article

      Emu Dreaming

      Jan 30, 2018

      Emu Dreaming
      7 min read

    • Article

      John Ashbery

      Mar 15, 2019

      He could understand the things at home.—Wallace Stevens, “Things of August” Scribbled on the expansive mist, the desireof many dwindles to usand our “activities,” wholesomeor otherwise. Soon it becomes apparentthat neither they nor I have any prise o

      4 min read

    • Article

      This Is Not a Defense of Poetry

      Mar 30, 2017

      The following remarks were originally delivered at the the Oslo Poesifestival 2016. A defense of poetry is a contradiction in terms. The honor to speak this evening, which I accept with great humility, though inevitably unnerving, I will use to cont

      12 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2019

      Then the blue screech the lake bellowing my name over a crowd but I never felt found never knew that sharp peal of a bellTo be greeted hello by a warm group of friends who all look like me but for long years I have been litigating HellOnly to win any

      1 min read

    • Article

      Bard In The Woods

      Nov 30, 2020

      Bard In The Woods
      4 min read

    • Article

      Mountain Time

      Jan 1, 2021

      In the air you don’t know who you are or where My own self feels it is in wind being born These are currents a man made one eighth of smokeless fire fears but chooses A path south from Anchorage to a Mountain House Ungovern the northern land to pass

      10 min read

    • Article

      “Properties of Thirst”

      Jul 5, 2022

      “Properties of Thirst”
      11 min read

    • Article

      Rome Is The City Of Poets

      May 4, 2018

      Rome Is The City Of Poets
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Vanished Birds

      Aug 12, 2020

      Starship captain Nia Imani returns home to one of the great trade Stations with an unexpected passenger who will change the course of history… Umbai’s Ark departed from the Colombian Elevator two years later, in early June. It was the third to leave

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Storm Is Blowing

      Apr 1, 2019

      A Storm Is Blowing
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The City Sanguinary, Sempiternal, Vast—

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The City Sanguinary, Sempiternal, Vast— - Merenel Brae

      I wake from daydreams to this real night.

      —The City of Dreadful Night,

      James Thomson, 1873

      For Jules Verne

      and Ursula K. Le Guin,

      in gratitude

      KIERTHFIN AVILSON HAD been less than a year in the capital when he had the dream for the first time — or at least the first time he recalled it upon waking, although as it was transpiring it felt a familiar one, as though he had dreamt it many times before but never recollected it until today. The cinereous morning light, patinated as though from the smoke of ten thousand chimneys, might have erased each preceding impression like the fading gray brocade of rain-stenciled leaf shapes drying on a pavement, fugitive pigments gone not in an hour but an instant from the mind’s self-painted simulacrum.

      Certainly that might explain those mornings when he awoke not refreshed from sleep but aching and weary, as though he had spent the night cramming his brain with figures and formulae in hopes of securing a score of sufficient excellence to guarantee his ranking would catch the eye of some City employer — as he had done! That triumph still filled his veins with joy, and grateful wonder that a boy from the hinterlands, whose mud-rutted schoolward road edged pastures thick with sheep turds and brambly nettle-deep ditches alongside, could aspire and win to more than an existence circumscribed by the same mire and wool and stony acres that his ancestors had seen every waking hour of their lives.

      Joyfully he strode the well-worn cobbles to the shadowy Commutation platform each morn, his spirit lifting with the cable-borne carriages that bore him and his fellow clerks to the upper elevations of the capital’s commercial heart; still he thrilled to find himself at a desk wrought not of ancient ink-stained oak or even mahogany, but xylolith shaped not by chisels nor saws but rather cast in place like concrete or bronze, yet so unlike either in its lightness and resistance to the damages of time.

      All around him was like that, airy arches of new materials, shining, iridescent, their invention making possible this renewed, bright City-above, like spring shoots growing from an ancient stump long deemed moribund: a newness not merely chronological, but of the human soul, awakening from an age of winter to fulfill that universal yearning for the skies!

      No amount of tedium had so far quelled that gladness in him, though he tried to seem as sophisticated as his fellow strivers who had grown up here to see the tall towers growing up apace, or had been here for enough years at least that this radiant impossible forest of steellite polygons and claridium domes that glowed like sunset clouds when night fell, thanks to the lustrine-powered lights within, did not amaze them now. He might not gasp out loud any more to behold an aerostat gliding past their windows from above, but still he felt the thrill of it.

      And so the dream, both in the experiencing of it, and the remembrance, smote him all the harder.

      It began, or his awareness of it at least, in such fashion that nothing at first seemed amiss for a long while, or at least no more than strange. He walked as he had so often done after a late night tapping away to transfer the day’s hastily-scribed figures into permanent record on steellite spools far below their floor, or upon the conclusion of some entertainment, a spectacular at the Viseum recreating famous moments in history complete with the scents of gunpowder and ocean spray, the creaking of spars and the screaming of gulls echoing right behind even the highest seats, as though you really eyewitnessed the Battle of Ixoris or the Discovery of Kallimagna, or felt the world thud and shudder about you as if truly present at the Day of Dread when the earth devoured Old Minaursa, and then after hastened to assuage your overworked nerves with a delicious concoction of rare liqueurs in the spectacle-palace’s own establishment, or one of the many that catered nightly to the crowds of merry-makers in the entertainment quarters of the City.

      But unlike those midnight strolls, in that there were no lights, no constellations of cold-burning Concourse lanterns, no galaxy of humanity’s own wrought stars replacing the old faint ones of the outer night, and no other pedestrians, either. Only a faint haze, such as he recalled from village evenings when a moon was neither up nor down, hidden by the hills or hovering mists, yet still shedding enough light to see that the streets were quite empty, a glowing tinged not blue nor apricot however but the faintly ruddy hue of lunar eclipse.

      The streets were wet, as though it had but lately ceased to rain, which might explain together with the lateness of the hour the lack of other travelers, saving for the fact that in the capital no one went out without an umbrella, since all attempts to tame the peninsula’s wayward weather had so far proved unsuccessful. Storms could blow up at any time, in any season, and nobody cared a whit — life had to go on, because the world did not stop turning, as the saying went. Perhaps in the countryside people could afford to waste half their lives waiting for darkness to end, but the City made its own light.

      At this time, in this place, however, there was neither. Only he himself for company, the sound of his footsteps the only disturbance in the silent metropolis, the faint gleam of less-than-dark as that distant vague illumination caught upon some rain-slick edge of masonry beside. It was the old burgh, the City-down, and it was not: the buildings all felt familiar, but none of them could he place exact, nor did any of the streets he traveled bring their names to mind.

      It seemed as though he walked for hours upon hours, seeing no one, hearing no other presence but himself, in a City impossibly silent and still, deserted but yet no ruin, everything solid and upstanding and sharp in its right angles, all the walls and roofs and steps leading to the doors and landings intact, all the windows unbroken, though smooth and dark as the wet pavements they overlooked. From not a single one did warm lamplight venture forth to challenge the dank oppressive night with a reminder that human hands had built this place, and upheld it still—

      Kierthfin continued onwards, in growing unease, although the absence of any persons, beasts, contrivances, or vehicles whatsoever meant that there was no evident danger that might overtake him, either deliberate or accidental. But the utter lifelessness of his surroundings itself betokened menace, something unnatural necessitated by impossibility, and with each step further across this monotonous array, so bewilderingly uniform in its variation, a crawling dread sank its rooting tendrils ever deeper into his core...

      It worried him, too, that the streets should be so wet, for in his experience storms in these parts rarely came and went so cleanly but tended to straggle after each other like wayward char-gray lambs, and he did not want to be caught out in another burst of such weather, with no rain gear

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1