Fejértorony

There’s dysphoria, and then there’s turning into a mid-size city. But sometimes you try male, you try female, you try different kinds of nonbinary and it only makes you realize that something still doesn’t quite fit, something fundamental. There is a mismatch.

I realized after my friend Juli moved abroad and became a library; a relational database, if you will. Part of a library, at least—the Esiranen National Records Groupmind. She’d said, it’s hard to figure out what to do with your magic sometimes, but I never had that feeling, so it took me a while to connect the dots about myself.

In any case, I’m not part of a city, I am the city. Fejértorony is not a huge metropolis, and one person is more than sufficient to run it.

You wouldn’t think, but it gets lonely sometimes.

Mihue

Archeology is beautiful; entire worlds can be constructed from shards and crumbs in the mud, and this is what I contemplate when I try to distract myself from the mud, the mud everywhere, staining my robes. But I needed to wear the Clairvoyants’ Guild garb, at least on my first day on the job, at least until they learn my face and my name and I become something other than the clairvoyant or rather, the foreigner. The Zhau.

The Guild doesn’t take kindly to immigrants either, and I had to fight tooth and nail to wear these robes, to get my diploma recognized in Fejértorony and Environs, to be able to work on a dig and instruct people where to look in the ground. There is protectionism and then there is nationalism; sometimes I get hit with both.

Digging before building within the city limits also serves one purpose: to uncover the glorious past, when Fejértorony was the center of the whole peninsula, the walled city in all its might.

Even now, a Guild official trails me, making sure I can indeed follow procedures. Just on the first day, I’ve been assured; but I don’t think they do this with anyone local.

“Dowsing rod or pendulum?” she asks, her eyes narrowing, her mouth thinning to a line.

“I just use my hands,” and the moment the words are out my mouth, I’m already second-guessing myself. I shouldn’t have said just, I shouldn’t have downplayed anything; I have just as much technique, artifice, and above all, practice as anyone else here. “Allow me to demonstrate,” I add, in a desperate bid to regain some respectability and self-assuredness.

I turn in a circle, snapping my fingers—the same mechanism as the dowsing rod or the pendulum. Amplifying and exteriorizing a small unconscious signal. Whenever the snap feels off, that’s the desired direction—like a tug on the dowsing rod, like the pendulum changing its motion.

I’m not looking for anything specific right now beyond “something important that hasn’t been uncovered yet,” but I’m certainly hoping for something impressive, a discovery that can cement my position.

From beyond the lot, hidden from view by a three-story apartment building, I can hear the noise of rhythmic chanting. A demonstration, I think. I do my best to ignore it.

I narrow down a spot and crouch to put my hands upon the earth, reach into the depths mentally if not physically.

There is a dizzying perspective reversal and the earth looks back at me, as something within me connects to the city, something previously unmoored. I startle, almost overbalance, almost topple into the mud. Invisible hands steady me.

The city of Fejértorony feels kind; kind and somewhat haphazard. Entirely unlike the cities I’ve lived in. Some were grouchy, frustrated for all their years beyond years. Some were aggressively defensive, all prickled up like hedgehogs. Fejértorony is young, and I wonder if there has recently been a change, the guardian of the city passing away. I don’t remember anything like that, but I’ve never paid much attention. I was never an infrastructure kind of mage; my power is vested in movement, in the leaves that fly on the streaming wind.

“Yes, yes?” a gruff voice from behind, one of the archeologists on the dig, bossing around his students—and now me.

I mutter a vague apology about having been distracted by the noise, then I show them the spot.

Fejértorony

Mages usually make small offerings, sometimes they forget. No one really cares much; it’s not like overseas. I’m the city and I do my job. I know about sewage and all sorts of flows. I babble sometimes, I guess most people don’t really want to hear about sewage, do they? But so many things are interesting.

It’s comfortable, having that distance both from my body and from my senses. I’m neither my body nor the outside. My body has been absorbed into the city somewhere in a small unmarked municipal building off a downtown thoroughfare. My body slowly became the thoroughfare, and the building, then the streets, and the buildings beyond. I haven’t checked on it in a while. My senses are city-senses, my mind the city-mind. It took a while to grow into the appropriate amount of processing power. Most people don’t realize just how much compute a city needs.

The way it works, it took me a while to be able to focus on the small individual details. Of course, on occasion something happens that just yanks my attention to it and doesn’t let go.

Like now, on an empty lot in District VII, on one of the municipal digs the city council insists on having. To uncover the glorious past.

Mihue

I need to remain alone for a while; I need to wait for work to end and for both the archeologists and the Guild official to release me. They found, treasure of treasures, an unbroken pot—ostensibly from Frintz V’s royal household. It’s something that hadn’t, couldn’t have shown up on their metal detectors.

I walk home by myself, stopping at a small grocery store to buy a few pieces of dried fruit, some rectangular sheets of glossy folding paper. I choose my favorite prints, the ones that come in via the Bíborvár trading route: curlicues and stylized clouds in shades of emerald green and a metallic yellow.

My alcove is empty, my little wooden home altar still packed away. I place one of the smaller boxes in the alcove, put a linen kerchief on top of it for a makeshift tablecloth. I apologize to the kindly powers. Then I set out to fold the sheets of paper, with single-minded concentration. I make a bird, a flower, then one of those fruit-shapes where you have to blow into the paper through a small hole to inflate the structure. I’m not sure why I choose these; I let my hands guide me, as usual, as with work. The practice focuses the mind, allows me to quieten my thoughts enough to be able to reach out to the city. To introduce myself.

Fejértorony

I appreciate when newcomer mages check in; there’s so much noise, it’s good to get a clear signal. The feeling is familiar—this is the same person who reached out to me earlier today on that municipal dig site.

I don’t need the offerings, but I like them. While Mihue folds and folds, I reach out to the endless bureaucratic databases, find the appropriate forms. Mihue Siwan Hadallar, twenty-eight years old, from Shorwald. An advanced degree in Applied Clairvoyance and the appropriate licensure to match. The Clairvoyants’ Guild recognizing the documentation as equivalent . . . I skip forward and back, looking for something more personal, but something Mihue’s still open to disclosing. As a city, I can mobilize immense amounts of magic, but it’s not something I’d use to bear down on anyone.

They refer to themself in non-gendered terms, and I feel an instantaneous, intense relief. I have to stop myself, turn inward, examine why.

Mihue

The city reaches out to me, without words at first, leaning on the symbolism common to most peoples of the Seven Lands: the circle divided into four, four gates, two main thoroughfares—or rivers? The schematic comes without explanation. The four quarters are of equal size, and this reminds me of how schemata like this one can obscure difference on one hand, inequality on the other.

I’ll have time to contemplate this later, for instance when my neighbor continues her rant from yesterday about how the people like me drive down property values. Did she go to the demonstration, I wonder. I force my mind to grow still.

Someone is looking for me. The city, but—who is the city? Who am I, for that matter?

I focus on the circle, keep the symbol firmly in my thoughts. Then I pose my question.

Fejértorony

Who am I? I chatter. I’m Fejértorony, formerly known as . . . Let’s not get into that. I had ample magic even before, but I’m not educated (not like you), this is one of those things one can truly only learn on the job. You become the city; there you have it. Sorry, I tend to snap at people. Most of my conversations are with paper-pushers.

The city called me, before I was the city. It happens like that. I said yes, I could’ve said no, but then—what then? I’d already been resigned to a life of always searching for the next wealthy patron who’d fund my studies, even before they’d really started. I’m not bitter—all right, maybe just a little. And this gave me an answer to the question I had, about myself, identity, whatnot.

Now, knowledge is like so many little bricks—I build them into myself. I was human five, six years ago; now, who knows? I’m massive and emotionally immature. Welcome to me. I mean you no harm.

Mihue

I didn’t expect the city to be fun. I smile to myself. Fun and—I search for the right word—comfortable? Sometimes two minds fit together well, and this is a relief, because I want to settle down here and apply for permanent residency as soon as I can. Even considering my neighbor and her comrades, anti-Zhau sentiments don’t run as high here as up North, do they? I can certainly get used to the weather, too. The atmosphere.

I hold our makeshift shared space in my mind, and gently, slowly rise to my feet. I look out the window, witness the towers, the housing blocks, a swirling mass of architectural styles and time periods. Layer upon layer upon layer. Fejértorony is beautiful.

I’ve also always been uncomfortable with my body, but the way I deal with the discomfort is to ignore it, move away from physicality. Everything is always at a one-step remove. I look plain, my haircut is plain, my thick braid hanging flat against my back and smoothing my curls onto my head is plain. Here, I look and sound like a foreigner, so maybe the citizens of Fejértorony will ignore even my plainness, only see me as a representative of a group they know little about: the Zhau. I wonder if I’ll keep wearing the clairvoyants’ robes, for the invisibility they might afford. Being only seen as my office, or as a nebulously defined outsider, might be better than being seen for myself and still disregarded.

I always felt I wasn’t doing gender right, that I should be more flamboyant, and I sometimes even feel resentment for those who are, those who can?

But Fejértorony can, and is, even without a body, even having a city for a body. I don’t know why I share these achingly personal feelings, when I should by all rights experience resentment, but there is something within us that clicks together. We are alike.

Fejértorony

Being seen like that. Being seen, period. Not by gruff elderly mages and municipal officials who each want me to maximize something. Throughput! Processing capability! Sewage outflow! Road repairs!

No, being seen for myself. For my strange and offbeat self, now well-hidden behind medieval facades. Being appreciated?

Mihue is going for a walk. With me. Keeping me in mind. In their mind.

I see everything, within the city and its environs, but now they also see me, and I see myself reflected in them. I see what they see, because they let me, they let me in.

They like the annoying birds that are chirping and flapping and generally being in people’s face. They think the birds are cute. A few years here and that’ll pass. I suppress a laugh. I see more of Mihue than they see of me, but there is so much more of me.

I long to be seen like that; never thought of it as a possibility.

Mihue

I keep up the contemplative frame, gently share my awareness with the city. A thought flits through me that I would like to have the reverse somehow, allow them to share their awareness with me. It would be overwhelming. I’m not a city—not even a library or a regional archive. Should I be? I prefer to remain small—I can’t even conceptualize what it’d be like to increase to such a size.

I walk, and the moment extends longer and longer, for as long as I can hold the connection. I’m not used to doing so, and even when I don’t feel I’m spending much effort, all of a sudden the exhaustion hits me and I have to apologize, distance myself, allow the magic to gently dissipate.

I find myself sitting on a bench, with a gap in my memories, unsure of how I got there. I’ll need to work up my endurance, I think, and then immediately question myself—why would I need to do that? For what reason, what end goal?

Belonging? Companionship? Some kind of feeling that is just beyond my reach, but that I can sense waiting for me around the next corner; so I get up and begin to walk.

Something draws me somewhere, as if I were pulled along on an invisible thread. I pass through tiny, meandering little streets, tangled alleyways. Pigeons and grime, scribbles on peeling paint. I stop for a moment to look; I can speak most languages of three of the Seven Lands, but reading takes an effort. LOVE IS A DELIGHT SURPASSING ALL—I don’t understand the next word—IN PROPORTION, I muddle through the words, muttering them to myself. A quote from a poem, or song lyrics perhaps? I get out my notebook and write it down. The notebook is for my clairvoyant impressions, but it will serve. I can’t think of when I last used it for another purpose.

I walk on; another corner, another set of graffiti. Someone is cursing out the King. I’m assuming lèse-majesté is not taken very seriously anymore, or is it? In any case, the words are unremarkable, not particularly poetic—not even in an offbeat found-poetry sense.

Then something that makes me reach into my sidebag again: CURSE THE CONSTRUCTION SACRIFICE—and then below, with the same handwriting—DON’T BELIEVE A WORD OF CONSENT. What does this mean?

Then, finally, a sentence about my people and how the Zhau are responsible for all the world’s ills. I avert my eyes—did I think I would escape this here?—, but note down the rest. CURSE THE CONSTRUCTION SACRIFICE. It has a magical resonance, but something defiant, aggressive. A construction sacrifice sounds like a bad thing, so cursing it would ostensibly be good, but then what is this uncomfortable feeling in my stomach? I’m already anticipating this to be blamed on me, too, even when I’m not sure what it is.

I turn away from the wall, hasten my pace.

Fejértorony

I’m no longer close to Mihue mentally, and I don’t force the connection. I wouldn’t. But I do follow their steps. They’re back in District VII and reading the various nasty remarks on the walls. I wanted to isolate them from this, I really did, but I also know it’s impossible.

We’ll have to be in this together.

The construction sacrifice. As for consent, I have my memories. Some people really can’t believe one’d do something entirely voluntarily. My memories I can always share; and I realize I’m already assuming Mihue would ask.

Mihue

I reach a small square and breathe a sigh of relief. I’ve been watching my back ever since I read that last line. Do I look Zhau? I must, even with my hair tied tightly back. My grandmother always warned me, and she had rich experience to back up her protectiveness. Suddenly everything appears in a different light, even the birds themselves.

There is a single plane tree in the middle of the square, concrete poured all around it. There’s also another bench, and I sit to hide my shaking. The sun is canting toward evening in the sky, though I can’t see much of it, surrounded by multi-story buildings. Mostly blocks of apartments, I think, but there’s some kind of utility building in the middle, made of plain Modernist brick. I can’t make out the sign by the entrance, and my curiosity overcomes my nerves as I get up again, walk closer.

CITY OF FEJÉRTORONY

MAINTENANCE

SERVICE BUILDING

This doesn’t tell me much. I lower my gaze, disappointed, when I notice that each brick below has a letter chalked onto it.

C—U—R—S—E—I know how this is going, and indeed. CURSE THE CONSTRUCTION SACRIFICE.

Mercifully, the other sentences are missing; but someone notices my attempts at reading and stops right next to me. I wince.

“Not from here, are you.” It’s more of a statement than a question, delivered in a frustrated baritone. “I’m your man.”

I shake my head, afraid to respond in words, afraid to see my accent reflected in the stranger’s scowl.

“I’d avoid this place if I were you.”

This place, meaning Fejértorony? This neighborhood? This small square? I want to ask, but he clarifies it right away.

“This building right here, a curse is laid upon it.” He turns around, spits over his shoulder. “Cursed thrice, for deliberate murder. Yet another thing the Zhau have imposed upon us.”

I startle. He didn’t realize I was Zhau? I nod, try to force firmness into my voice. “How so?” I ask, desperate to keep him talking, because while he talks, he won’t try to hurt me. I feel devoid of magic, wrung out, unable to protect myself. I should’ve taken precautions.

“This Zhau custom of killing someone to keep the city going. It’s evil,” he says.

What Zhau custom? I can’t think of anything even remotely similar. “Who was killed?” I ask instead.

“This young man. Woman? I’m not sure. They killed him. Her. Them. To keep the city going. Just like they do every couple of hundred years.” He pauses. “The roots of corruption reach deep.”

I realize the man is drunk, not on alcohol, but on something else that’s not scenting his breath.

I murmur something I hope doesn’t sound foreign. I excuse myself. I try not to break into a run, I try. “Hey, you,” he yells after me, but I’ve already turned a corner, and it’s as if the alleyways themselves are shielding me from view, bending over me.

Fejértorony

I follow Mihue with my gaze as they stagger homeward, shaking from fear. I want to talk to them. I want to speak. Why them? There are 18743 trans people within my boundaries, and I honestly like most of them. Why Mihue? We have much in common, but just as many differences. I grew up here. I tend toward the flamboyant, not the hiding. Why do I feel we need to talk? Do we need to talk, or is it only me? I need to talk.

I don’t have any humanoid platforms, never felt the need to have them. But now I need something. I take control of Titanium Raven 4, aerial mobile platform, bird. Some birds are real.

I’m the city, yes, and now I’m also the raven soaring above it. I circle. Mihue is asleep. I wait.

Mihue

I wake in the morning, wash and dress, my limbs sluggish. Just how much magic did yesterday take? I rub my face over and over again, but nothing banishes the woozy, mushy feeling. I am grateful I have this day off; some pipe burst while they were digging and now everyone’s busy with the cleanup. The potsherds can wait.

I’m munching on my breakfast of porridge with some smoked fish, poking at my food without eating more than strictly necessary. A crow alights on my windowsill just as I finish and rise to wash out my bowl. An enormous crow—no, a raven—an enormous raven. It knocks on the glass, eerily purposefully. I reach out and expand my awareness; but it’s not a magical creature, it’s a robot of some kind. A mobile platform, I think they call them here. It’s only slightly terrifying. It looks like something intended for warfare.

I open the window. “Are you . . .?” The city, yes. This relaxes me somewhat.

“I thought this would be easier. Less of a demand on your magic,” the enormous raven says. Then, “I just wanted to talk.”

I put my bowl back down. This should feel like an imposition, but somehow it doesn’t. I wanted to ask the city about a variety of things, from the mysterious cursed building to . . . It suddenly strikes me that the pipe burst might have been purposeful. I sit, lean back in my chair. A breeze ruffles the curtains by the open window.

Fejértorony

Mihue doesn’t ask me the questions I can feel they want to ask. This would be annoying, except we’re having a great time. I haven’t talked to anyone like this in a while, I wasn’t even sure I still could. Nothing work-related. I feel human, I mean, as much as I can get. Somehow I can feel human without giving up anything else, without giving up cityness. Something deep inside me wants to flail and jump, reaching toward the sky. Yes!!

“Ach!” Mihue grimaces. “I should’ve washed out the bowl, now the porridge has all dried into it. I’ll have to soak it . . .” They look around, as if awakening from a dream. I’ve kept my mental distance, but I feel—longing? They shake their head. “Let’s deal with this later, what do you think about going for a walk? I mean you’re everywhere, but I can take your um, mobile platform for a walk.” Do they sound more awkward than they were supposed to sound?

I’m glad to go. The raven’s a bit unwieldy, so I’m not following them into the building. I wait for them to prepare and walk down the stairwell, step outside.

“You have something a . . . like a nerve center, yes? We could walk there, if you don’t mind,” they ask. They don’t know?

“You were there yesterday,” I say.

They do a double-take. “The cursed building? . . . Oh, I don’t mean it that way. I mean, that’s just what that guy called it. I didn’t really understand that, I’ve been meaning to ask . . .”

I don’t want to share this conversation with passers-by. “I have many secrets like that,” I say in Zhau, and they can’t even brace for that after the first shock.

“You’re Zhau?” they switch too.

“My mother is, yes.” Am I willing to commit to more? I always feel so inauthentic. Or? “Well, I guess that counts.” I can’t believe I said that. Now that I’ve sorted out the difficulty of my body, my other aspects also feel less anxiety-inducing? My first personal conversation in years and I didn’t expect this is how it’d go.

“So what’s this with the curse, is that related?” they ask.

This isn’t going to get any easier. If only the raven could shudder.

“Related, yes, but not the way people expect?”

Mihue

My head is spinning. I have to sit down on a concrete block that looks like a ship’s mooring, except it’s in the middle of the city. The block is comfortingly warm to the touch; I take a deep breath. “So let me see if I got it right. There are people who are some kind of . . . political extremists. And they say that this custom of having people run the city has been imported from abroad, and it’s wrong.”

“Yes, they say it’s all because of the Zhau.” The robotic raven speaks with natural inflections, but doesn’t make the corresponding gestures. I feel like I’m supposed to think this odd, but I find it relatable.

I go on. “So the evil foreign Zhau ostensibly sacrifice young, hale and hearty locals to run the city . . . These folks don’t realize you’re Zhau, do they.”

“They don’t know anything about me.” The vehemence comes across even through the raven—and also through the rustle of the decorative bushes planted in front of the apartment building across from us, from the way the air twists and turns. “They don’t know anything. . . I wanted to do this. Become the city.”

I nod. Being at cross-purposes with the body, I know that all too well. “And it feels good,” I say. “Better.” That I don’t know, I’m just risking a guess.

“Better, yes, but I had to give up a lot.”

“Having a human body?” Guesses after guesses. I feel on unstable ground, I can’t extrapolate any further from my own experiences. I’ve never been a city.

“No, I . . . That . . . I . . .”

They fall silent.

I wait it out. The breeze twirls.

“You’re the first person who’s had a . . . conversation with me in a long while.”

“Would you like me to share my body a bit? I had to practice that a lot in college.” I don’t add that I wasn’t terribly good at it in college; clairvoyance was always my strong suit.

“Thank you, but . . . That’s not what I gave up. I gave up . . . Being considered human? It’s a tradeoff.”

All of a sudden the feeling, their feeling hits me: they want to be closer to me, but they don’t know how to achieve that, don’t even know if it’s possible. We’ve even kept our magical distance. I turn my head away from the raven, but the city is everywhere.

I slowly stand. “Let’s keep walking,” I offer, to break the silence, the unease.

Fejértorony

They can’t really see me, or, they see me already. I’m all around. I don’t know why the building is so important. But it’s important to me too, not just to Mihue. I think I want to share something intimate. Maintenance, service building—all I can offer.

I open the door.

Mihue

I step inside and everything is surprisingly well-lit; I expected something murky, spooky, but this magic is strong enough to abide observation. The door closes behind me, but I don’t startle.

The raven totters beside me, like a large metallic dog. The shape is unsuited to walking, but the space is unsuited to flight.

The walls are covered with plain white tile, but tendrils tie themselves into the cracks between them, run along the walls in large sweeping arcs. They are bluish-greenish-yellow-orange-red; they shift, shimmer, and I can’t quite pin down their color. They remind me of the roots of a tree, the tendrils of a plant, the nerves and tendons of an animal. The similarity goes beyond homology, analogy, convergent development; it appears to me as if all were truly one, everything manifestations of a unitary underlying whole.

Is this what the ancients meant about the tree of life?

I run my fingers along the tiles, not quite daring to touch the tendrils out of a fear of disturbing them. I walk at a slow, even pace, and the substance on the walls and the ceiling thickens until the tiles are entirely obscured. Two yellow lines run on the floor, a demarcation of some kind, and I walk in the plain, bare flooring between them; the same kind of tiles as on the walls, but with an undulating sawtooth pattern, I’m assuming to increase grip. The ambient magic feels thicker and thicker, to the point where I become simultaneously uneasy about breathing it in, and can’t even think of not breathing it in.

The raven’s creaky voice breaks the spell. “I don’t have a body anymore besides this. This isn’t my body, even—the city is my body. I just wanted to . . .”

They fall silent for so long, I involuntarily reach out through the magic—and I feel the fabric of reality itself shudder around me for an instant.

“They don’t believe me, but you, you’ll believe me,” the raven whispers. “Can I show you?”

“Please.” My lips feel numb. “Please do.”

Fejértorony

I show them my memories. They don’t hurt; the disbelief hurts. A million voices repeating How could you have done this to yourself and sometimes the same people who’d gladly rely on me for anything.

But the voices start later.

There’s the moment when it first hits me, walking down Liliom Avenue at around two in the morning and there are very few people about. The streetlights are a warm yellow, unlike in the next neighborhood over, where they are a sharp, biting white. That thought makes me think of the city, its patchwork nature, but with an organizing principle behind it. And this is what connects me to the principle, to the city behind the principle, the generations-old mind.

The mind aging past the boundary of life, seeking a replacement.

The city folding out from one point, like multidimensional petals around me, and I see—I experience.

It ends in an instant, but in the next breath I already miss it.

There’s that moment I knock on the door of a nondescript utility building in inner-city Fejértorony. The left sleeve of my shirt is soaked because a bird had pooped on it and I tried to wash the stain off in a fountain. I feel ridiculous. I find myself welcomed.

There is the light, light neverending. Stretching out in all directions—it’s not a cessation of discomfort, but I feel that too—expanding, further—

“You need to incorporate more variables into the traffic analysis,” the engineer says.

I hasten to update his readout. “Everything below the line accounts for 0.5% or less variance,” I say, a trifle annoyed.

He notices. “What’s going on, something stuck in your sewer pipes? Are you busy?” He laughs, like an empty barrel resounding. I don’t need this—I don’t need to dedicate this much awareness to this interaction. Not when I’m still sharing it with—

Mihue

I get both the highs and the lows; Fejértorony shares it all with me. There is the mind-expanding rush of being city, all at once, even when I’m not really able to assimilate it, let alone process it much with my human senses. And then there’s this engineer guy with the black mustache he keeps on tugging, while he’s making jokes in bad taste and with supreme self-satisfaction. The everyday of being city. There’s only a taste of everything, but this in itself is sufficient to unsettle the foundations of my mind.

Yes, it feels good, amidst all the uprooted concepts tossed into the air and raining back down. I don’t understand, and I thought I understood at least myself, but now even that is disrupted, and I’m not clear on what will take its place; only that it will be exciting, it will be like stepping out into the light. It will be the opposite of this hiding, this hoping no one will notice me—and yet being able to hide even better, transparent to observation, laying out my entire body for all to see. Do streetlights count as exhibitionism? In any case, they should at the very least match.

Suddenly, another realization: if I were city, I would be aware of much more, I would be aware of the layers upon layers of my history . . . I think of the municipal government, and its bottomless desire to claim the past as a justification of its present. I would be aware of my history, and I would not hand it over. Not indiscriminately. Not to those in power.

I feel ashamed of my work, using what little magic I have at my disposal to dig up a potsherd someone will use as a political argument against people like me. Immigrants? People of nebulous, undecided, non-normative genders? Zhau?

“I understand what you’re doing,” I whisper into the charged air. “Fejértorony. I thought I also understood why. The desire to let go of this human shape . . . But there’s more to it, at the same time.”

I don’t say the words, but I think them so clearly that the distinction matters little in this environment: Our existence disrupts the norms. But there’s more to it than that. We can work toward something new, something liberating in more senses than one. Living and thriving and helping others thrive.

I know I won’t even need to give up my treasured invisibility for that. I lower my head—am I crying? And back to words, almost as hoarse as the robotic raven: “Thank you for showing this to me.”

I don’t know how to say it, even in my thoughts, but I feel it—the love felt toward me, that I’m only happy to reciprocate, and relish in this newfound mutuality, this brightness ever-extending—

Then as I’m walking back along the long corridor, slowly, with measured steps, someone breaks open the door.

Fejértorony

You know that feeling when you finally find out what you wanted all along, and then right away, the whole entire world goes like no, you can’t have that?

That.

And you know that other feeling where it hits you that something you’ve deliberately not done is coming back to bite you in the ass and you’re like, maybe I should rethink my life plans except fast, because those guys, they have torches?

Yeah, no.

Maybe I should’ve spied more on people. Then I wouldn’t have been caught unawares. I suspected, sure, I can read the graffiti. Curse the construction sacrifice and all that.

Can it be like . . . you know, in our holy texts there is this story about this one dude who’s hired to curse the enemy, and then he goes to look, and blesses them instead?

This isn’t going to turn out like that.

Mihue

I have a pocket knife, simply because it’s handy to have, and I confess I always have the possibility at the back of my thoughts that I’ll need to frighten someone away from my body one day.

I think we’ve arrived at that day, so I draw the knife and try to stand in a stance that’s at least somewhat threatening. There is enough ambient magic here for me to cause direct harm, but I’ve never trained in the spellwork of combat, and I also don’t know if I’d like to have that on my conscience. Killing someone with a knife is bad enough, even if in self-defense, but killing someone with magic is somehow worse than that—it’s a kind of sacrilege, taking life away with what should in regular circumstances give and sustain life.

Of course, this mob doesn’t leave me a chance to follow through with my internal argument.

It was a welcome thought at first that I was the only one in the building, alone and together with the city, with Fejértorony—but now this makes me a target as I stand face to face with three broad-shouldered invaders.

“Zhau, eh,” one groans at me, or at one of his fellows?

The air shivers.

“They’re here to do another sacrifice,” another of them nods briskly. “Look, with a knife.”

Why do they have torches? Surely they wouldn’t expect complete darkness in here. Fire as a threat?

“What should we do with this one?” The third waves a torch at me. Definitely as a threat.

I can’t think of anything to say in my defense. I’m not here to do any sacrifice and there was no victim in any case. People volunteer to become city. But from their perspective—and I can almost touch their thoughts, with so much magic; their unspoken words tremble on my tongue—they expected something monstrous in here, and the Zhau carrying out the deed, with a sacrificial knife, or something else that’s sufficiently sharp. They found this; they found me.

There has been no sacrifice, Fejértorony says, directly, not through the raven; and the ground shakes with the force of their words, with the magnitude of their presence. I’m here of my own will.

“Lies! Trickery!” an invader shouts, and all of them push forward, more of them behind the three, with torches and sticks and clubs and does any of them have a—

The raven flies into the crowd. The attackers scream, try to scatter, but there’s no room, and the walls—

The walls themselves flare up with a surfeit of magic, but one of the invaders tries to fight the glow with real physical fire—rapid oxidation, the expression pops into my head—and rapid it is, where the torch meets the wall, where the burning snakes along the tendrils, the scream, the scream echoing in my head—

I swing forward, knife all but forgotten, grabbing ahold of all the magic and yanking, yanking as if I could yank the ground itself from under their feet, fighting like a dragon the way I would never fight for my own self, fighting finally having found a purpose, fighting screaming and the fire burns, it burns not only the city but also me, that revolting smell of hair on fire, that revolting smell of I cannot pause I cannot allow myself to become distracted.

There has been no construction sacrifice, but there has been a curse, I am the curse, the revenge for everything every biting remark every slur scraped onto brickwork and smeared across stone, every swinging fist.

I drive them out of the building, by myself, the raven an inert heap of metal, my mind in tatters, my skin I cannot, I know if I start paying attention to my body it will all slip away from me.

I don’t think any of them are dead, even though I should, I really should.

I slam the door shut.

Behind me, further in, rain is falling from the ceiling, fog is rising from the walls. The fire subsides. Why is there such a need of body?

Maybe there isn’t, I think, and with that I lose my balance, fall endlessly fall.

Fejértorony

.

Mihue

I come to later. I’m outside time. Outside sense and reason. I drag myself inward, toward the light. Toward that sense of belonging, relation, toward love. On floor tiles cracked from heat and agony.

There is need, yes, but there is also understanding.

I could stop here. Let go of the needless body.

I go on. Crawling, stumbling.

.

.

.

Fire has ravaged the inner sanctum. Light, life-giving light, life-taking light.

Yet Fejértorony is alive. Life pulsates in the walls. I’m alive. Forehead to a broken tile, breath erratic, heartbeat—

.

A belonging I sense just beyond. The kinship that arises from understanding; the understanding that arises from kinship.

I float, sink, merge into the floor, body slip-sliding into the cracks in the tiles. I reach out.

Fejértorony

The newfound. This. Wordlessnesses that call out to me, tendon and nerve.

Hands reach. I reach back.

Mihue

The world spins.

Fejértorony

Imitative musical counterpoint. I lose grip on being, on extent—mine, theirs, yours.

When you finally find out what you wanted all along, who you wanted—and why—

The similarity of our minds lends itself to a joining.

Mihue

I come to much later; I could say that arms embrace me and warm breath flutters the unruly strands of hair that have escaped from my braid. Except I have no braid and they have no arms. I struggle to orient myself. Breath is a sense of the wind moving through weather stations. My heartbeat the flow of traffic. I share but not share all this with Fejértorony, the city—for I am the city too, but I am not them. We are two minds to the same sensory layout.

You can call me Shamru, they whisper, and I hear that little hesitation before their name that tells me this is a name recently chosen. Maybe in this very instant.

My body is out there somewhere, tendrils from the walls sliding into it while my blood seeps into the cracks between the tiles, my own homemade construction sacrifice. My eyes are closed, my limbs numb. Yet instead of feeling less, I feel more. The body dissipates, gives way to something gigantic.

What was it Shamru said, aeons ago? About the need to grow into more compute? I didn’t even understand the term. Now I can see the need, feel it. How can a lack of body be so tactile? Instead of nothing, everything is up close. Instead of no body, everything is body.

Instead of being alone . . .

Shamru

Let’s not merge. It would be easy. But this way it’s better—as long as there’s some separation between us, there’s interaction, and . . .

I’ll have to say it, one way or another, right?

There is love.

Right? We can be city together.

Mihue

Something spins in me. Be city, yes; be together, yes; but—together, like this? A city for them? For the people who attacked with torches and knives and clubs and claimed I was the invader, I was the murderer? For the municipality who looked the other way, maybe even encouraged them?

Together it’s easier, Shamru whispers, and something between our minds slides aside and I know that this is what they were trying to protect me from. And also, the knowledge that once you’re more easily seen, you’re also more easily hurt. In your body or outside of it.

While I slumbered, the municipality was frantically trying to find the right spin, trying to damage-control. As the politics churn on, two confused engineers poke at my body, my previous body, trying to see if they can peel it away from the floor.

I’m not there anymore, I say, experimentally, my voice detaching from the walls and floating, floating. The engineers look as if they’ve seen a ghost, but I’ve never been more alive.

I’ll need to catch up on the news. Together, I whisper back to Shamru, just between the two of us. Not everything is for engineers’ ears.

My perspective wobbles; the frames I’ve built inside myself rotate, twist inside out.

Together it’s easier, I repeat Shamru’s words

your words,

and we can do it, we can live, we have centuries ahead of us and we can grow: apart, together, separately, joined, in as many configurations of city as have existed or will come into being blossoming from our minds—

One city, two cities, four and a half cities, a metropolis, villages, centralized, decentralized, dense, sprawling, welcoming, welcoming, welcoming—

a perspective centuries deep opens in front of me.

Together, I tell you, in love.

Endnote:

The story is, in a very abstract way, inspired by the traditional Hungarian murder ballad “Kelemen the Stonemason” featuring the folkloric theme of the construction sacrifice.

I first read about the link between the theme of the construction sacrifice and that of antisemitic blood libel in Attila Pejin’s article “Vérvád és építőáldozat” published in Hacofe, the quarterly journal of the Budapest Jewish Theological Seminary—University of Jewish Studies. (Available at bit.ly/3kTcgWq.)