The City of Growth

  Long ago, long before the thing called human walked the Earth, long before the Earth was a place where a thing called human could walk, there existed a place far from the Earth, where violet stars shined among the glowing clouds. Circling one such star was one small world that harbored life. They could not see even with their greatest of instruments beyond the clouds that engulfed their stars, to them the universe was only that within this sphere; small to those beyond the cloud, massive to those within it. Imagining what lay beyond the cloud no more a possible task than to imagine what lay beyond the visible universe.

 

   The “people”, although to call them that is to only state they were intelligent, more so than any human of the current age perhaps, perhaps even while very young. They were not a thing like humans however, nor a thing like a fish, a reptile, or a bird, they were not things with tentacles or feelers, or any appendage of any known living thing of Earth. These beings also had mastered among many other things a mastery over construction and deconstruction, a new form of matter not solid, liquid, gas, or plasma, nor requiring or emitting the heat normally required to change between them in its static state. They could grow cities as easily as one grows vegetables. One city in particular had mastered this beyond anything their own scientists of any nation upon their world had imagined possible. The city of Growth, great capital of the greatest empire their world had ever known, one that reached for the stars for new homes.

 

   They created their city, a constantly changing place, a place where the skyline would differ day by day, the citizens reveled in the novel and strange. For it is from the nothing between universes that they gained their matter, changed it, localized it using a technique impossible to describe perhaps to all but the most advanced scientists and even then only as a farfetched marvel of an idea impossible to achieve for it should require the energy of a supernova and yet it did not. The leaders of this nation were proud, their enemies jealous, and in their hubris declared themselves as gods, for their city of growth not only could grow inanimate objects, but life as well, rebuilding the very citizens and animals of the city into the superior race, the master race of their species.

 

  It is then that the rot came, a sickening red and brittle scab upon the buildings that would crumble and be rebuilt only to crumble again in a few days. It spread, it spread across the roads, the stairs, the walls, the ceilings, the great monolithic towers, and then to the living. The living would crumble slowly, in different ways, different parts at different times. The city of Growth, oh Fendirha the city of Rot it became, taken back its pre-imperial name as no longer a city of growing things, but only of death. The once marvelous capital quarantined for the safety of all. A great dome placed over the city, a structure so massive it could be seen from space. The ground became a red dust, the city never stopped growing, only now the red dust would grow into mockeries of shapes, including that of rotting corpses that would move and claw at the dome. The dome was extended as the rot spread down below the surface, to incase it fully as a sphere. Now a bubble half filled with a horrid red contagious dust, from which horrors would spread forth and claw at the bubble searching for a weakness. They never learned if this was some monstrous creature that had consumed the land, a disease, or perhaps the souls of the citizens crying out for freedom from the mold of horrors they had become. For it was that one day the sphere was gone, overnight a great un-natural mist had enveloped the dome obscuring it from the sight of the watch towers many miles away. In an instant it was gone living only a massive hole that quickly filled with water from the sea. Fendirha was gone, where it went they would never know, and who or what great power could have taken it a greater mystery; one that terrified their worlds leaders and citizens for many a year before the apathy of inactive time set in.