The City Comes Into View

You crest the last long rise in the road and there, at last, it is — laid out in the shallow valley below you like something out of a story. After so many days with nothing but empty horizon for company, the sheer scale of the place is almost too much to take in at once. Walls the warm colour of honey in the low afternoon sun ring a sprawl of roofs beyond any counting, tier upon tier of them stepping down toward a broad river that catches the light and throws it back at you in a thousand broken, glittering pieces.

Smoke from countless hearths hazes the whole into something half-dreamed and shimmering, softening its edges, so that it seems less a place you could walk into than a vision that might dissolve if you blinked. Even from up here the sound of it reaches you across the distance — a low, constant, layered murmur of voices and cartwheels and bells and hammers, the steady breathing of a place that never entirely sleeps. And the road beneath your feet, empty for so long, is suddenly busy: other travellers drawn the same way you are, carts and pilgrims and traders all converging on the great gates, which stand open far below, small with distance, patiently swallowing the world one traveller at a time.