All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain...
(HP Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
I never fell. I rose, plucked sleeping from the earth, launched by despair and ritual to ascend into madness and truth, borne aloft by--whom? The one who now attends me? Kyr master? The Threefold Creator, the Gate and Key, the Great Flood, the Woven Sky, or something--someOne--else altogether? The story in reverse--not a home become a dream, but a dream become a home--what, shall I steal the gods away from obscurity? Bring them from the unknowable realms to my own? Then is it Nodens I must seek? Nyarlathotep? SomeOne else entirely? The bards of Azathoth play on all the while.
"You have questions, but do you want the answers?"
Dream in black and white.
I have no New England, no Boston. The liquid loveliness of the land that birthed me still sings in my veins, but its captors cast me out long ago for being something they did not--could not--understand. That home is brittle and fragmented now in the desert air, and I suspect the juniper branches in which I made my home as a youth would not bear my weight now. Make no mistake, Gatsby, you can't go home again.
What, then, of the sunset city? I have no home to become a dream; a dream, then, must become a home. It has haunted my mind in song and sight for as long as I can remember, a hundred snippets of a dozen places--the earthy embrace of the high desert, Puerto Peñasco's sunrise washing thinly over sand and adobe, the ancient cities of limestone and marble that sang of my gods in tongues now gone but no longer forgotten, the little Mediterranean hamlets my mother always yearned to build for herself, a Topaz city by the sea untarnished yet by the reality that would come in time, the Hotel Womb just outside the Metropolis, the Labyrinth that gives and takes, the labyrinth that Cuts You Up, the dark thin-film glimmering of an Unforgettable Fire, the fantastical architecture by which one might approach the homunculus of Monument Valley.
Do not confuse hermetics with sealing away--this city cannot be solely my own. It is the fantastical golden city of all those who claim it as their own when their earthly homes have failed them. Transcendence, love without bounds--these are of the gods, and of the queer. Feeling deeply, fixating deeply, focusing deeply, becoming one with this world or another, dancing along the harmonics played on cosmic strings--these are of the gods, and of the mad. Speaking in tongues, thinking in concept-sense-images, taking a form not of flesh but of the soul--these are of the gods, and of the other-than-human. We are gods, then, and we will not be sequestered in the onyx castle and its cold wasteland any longer. We dance upon the mountains, walk among its folk, drink deeply of this realm.
The fallen star has risen once again, one leap of faith--nay, of conviction--begetting another, and stakes its claim in the swirling void where stars and galaxies flare up and die in the same trillion-year breath for the sake of every displaced dreamer like itself. We trail nebulae of experience, and from them weave stories. We run our fingers through the starry sand of the cosmic shore, and from it shape worlds. We hear the music of the spheres, and from it piece together leitmotifs of souls. We are gods, and we break the void's silence.
A desert behind, a coastline ahead, perhaps where a calm river meets the sea, a cove sheltered from the storm. The salt mist disperses quickly away from the shore, barely wafting up beyond the sands themselves except at night.
Almost always warm, fragrant, fluffy cumulus to sunshower stratus clouds by day, the peculiar breeze of something about to change by night. Usually a cool late spring or gentle early summer, occasionally the pleasant chill of fall, once in a while a snow that blankets and quiets but does not freeze nor frost. The seasons come in no particular order, irrespective of each other--each clime is as the city has always been. The night always sparkles, and every so often, a stairway into the diamond-strewn sky appears somewhere on the outskirts. The city glitters at a distance, a quiet golden spattering when viewed from the moonlit white dunes, but at street level each lamp is so awfully, poignantly small against the great dark of the heavens. The architecture is reduced to small patches of wan yellow between half-distinguished silhouettes of white washed to blue by the night. Only birds and insects break the silence, or perhaps the lapping of water against a small boat on the canal below.
It has been there for time immemorial, it manifested as soon as you arrived--it has no history, it is the river in which you can never step twice. Identities are not forgotten here, rather, but unimportant--epithets rather than names prevail, or else names in a tongue unrecognizable to all but those who speak it, and the only one who speaks it is the bearer of this name. You cannot arrive here for the first time on purpose. You cannot leave on accident. Some awaken here, some are carried to safety by the creatures who walk between worlds, some fall to earth, some stumble out of the desert or wash up on the beach. Not all are here to seek, but all will eventually find, and only then can they choose to move on--most do, but some do not.
Time does not pass here; you do not age, nor weary, nor hunger, nor thirst. All food and drink is a gift, either from the twin wildernesses beyond the sands or from one denizen to another. It is gathered and prepared, always, for a purpose. Dust settles, but decay is hard to find. Everything is simultaneously from before the birth of capitalism, and after the end of everything.
The streets are somehow always sparse or empty, save for an errant festival or feast that occasionally asserts itself in each mind in unison before it, too, either stays or fades away. At most, a few people may find themselves drawn to the same bonfire, one of many that flare to life here and there in the streets at night, and marvel in whatever ways they find fitting at how their paths have crossed. All conversations have a reason, and almost all are without purpose. You will always know when to speak. There are no shops, as you want for very little, and all that you need will come to you through barter or your own two hands. There are residences, gardens, libraries, museums, but most of all traversals, structures whose purpose is to be experienced with both the eye and the tread, to be climbed or wended through or gotten lost in, to reflect the one who wanders through them. The labyrinth of the city contains the labyrinth of the structure contains the labyrinth of the self. You are both Theseus and the Minotaur.
This place is a temple--no, a meditation. Faith-threads run thick through these streets, in as many different colors and textures and origins and destinations as there are people in the city. Any fountain or bit of greenery is liable to become a shrine to something or another, whether for an hour or a day or a century, collecting icons and offerings by which the tutelary entities may anchor themselves, casting their lines to their followers and each other, a pier of souls in this singularly unmoored place. Anything by which one may make meaning can become incorporated into this weaving--art, sport, puzzlement, music, debate, science, all roam the streets and drift through windows intermingled, for this is no monastery, and the cosmos here whispers loudly enough that one needs no asceticism to quiet the mind and hear its words.