Where the Maps Ended - SCP Foundation

The King's emaciated figure would slowly float from and sink back into his throne when L'étranger in rags recounting his journey, and would bend into a waist bridge in the shape of the Greek letter Ω with constant rattlings of the chains twisting. Pale tendrils slithered in and out of his tattered robes, showing his bizarre curiosity and the thirst for information. Unlike those who were brought before the King in the past, there was no fear on L'étranger's face, but calmness in his voice. L'étranger told things that the King had never heard of. Even though Alagadda was so vast and comprehensive, and no matter how all-embracing the King's empire was, no one had ever told him such things: the city-states, the countries and the worlds that had never been imagined and was thrown over the mountains or sunk to the seafloor before everything was born, never be mentioned for good. That's the ashes of nothingness, crossed by two fingers between the brows of L'étranger, carrying a distant scent that shook the King's heart in his chest, formed black halos before his eyes, and mixed with the laughter of red-eye crows and the obscure fragrance of dried flowers, revealing the intangible essence of the illusory neverland: Alagadda, a smudge of ethereal chimera, a ruin with hysteria, was just like a puddle of rotten honey on the ground in an afternoon of summer. There would be a bowl of hollow sunlight, following the words of L'étranger, into the decaying smell of the King's body, making him intoxicated with desire.

- But only in the endless ramblings of L'étranger was the King able to extricate from the phantom named Alagadda, over his tottering but everlasting great dynasty, to the places where the maps ended whatever they're called, and to touch the fine marble sculptures with the same ecstasy as if holding a bowl of blood in his hands all those years ago.

I

On the second day travellers arrive at Maviral, they will forget their first day's experience and think that day is the first, and thus they might spend all of their remaining days there. But that doesn't mean that Maviral is somehow unusual or paranormal, but quite the contrary that it's nothing special at all. In Marviral, the sky is exactly the same as elsewhere, the buildings are exactly the same as elsewhere, and even the pedestrians on the roads are no different from anywhere else. If one closes his eyes, everything of Maviral will fade away instantly in his mind, leaving a solitary name of the city, and when he opens his eyes and beholds again, he will find things both alien and familiar, for he cannot recognize anything he used to be well acquainted with, which are all forgotten at the moment.

Some would try to remember the scenes of Maviral: the sidewalks paved with cyan slates and mossy bricks, the stores with glass doors wide open, the street lamps with one of the four bulbs broken. They memorizes these things but then think of the stone pavements, convenient stores and unfixed street lamps of other cities, while the impression of Maviral is gone with the wind, because there's nothing memorable, and everything is exactly the same as other places. Marviral has everything that any other city has, or rather, Maviral is a city without qualities, so it's the model of all cities, the embodiment of the word "city", a true ideal. To this end, the only thing Maviral could be remembered for is no more than its name Maviral.

II

All travellers believe that if one walks in a trio on a dusty road, sooner or later will he reach the Auroral River, whose water is white and blue, and the air along the riverbank is filled with the smell of agalloch burning as well as a scent like the sound of violin music. The river is always covered by a milky mist like a bride's veil and there is faint light scattering around like spilled gruel.

For each person who drinks the water, it signifies something different. For some, it means that he would die in a duel for a woman on his way home; for some, it means that he would polish marble and granite in a small frontier town in his rest fifty years; for some, it means that he would receive a sudden death when the water flows through his throat; or for you, Your Immortality, drinking the Auroral water probably means that Alagadda shall prosper forever and no force dares to challenge your great empire. The Auroral River predicts the ending of every drinker, the ending that is irrevocable, and all the sum of efforts still can't stop one himself from heading towards the ending that the water prophesied, even to change the causality is useless. It is what makes everything uncertain into certainty, erasing the variability. Yet, perhaps (just perhaps!) the Auroral River is merely a river that requires three people to reach it.

III

Once there was a jeweller who drank the Auroral River and saw a city full of colourful flags in his dream, and twenty years later he still remembered everything about the city: the shiny glazed tiles on the roofs, the varied round mirrors hanging by the doors, and the fine white teeth of the men, women and children in the city, and also knew that the city was built by fifteen pairs of men and women. So he set off for the city at the age of twenty-four, and when he stopped at forty-five and came a meadow in a wood by a river, he encountered twenty-nine jewellers and they stared at each other in confusion. There were just fifteen men and fifteen women in all, including himself. They didn't see the city that appeared in their dreams, but in the pouring rain, in the five-palms-deep water, in the raining moonlight, they saw all the materials for building the dream city, which did not seem to exist a day before.

Maybe it's not quite like what you think, their dreams were similar but not identical, not to mention that twenty-one years had passed and the memories that were still clear in the twentieth year were now tinged with blur, but they decided to build the city anyway: he put up the flags that fluttered in his dreams, and she burned the glass that shimmered in hers. Over the years, the thirty dreams became both vaguer and clearer, and gnawed together like thirty different-sized gears, until exactly forty years later they completed the city, which was no bigger than a town. And the day after the last keystone was laid, they were surprised to find the city was filled with the men, women and children with teeth as fine and bright as those in their gorgeous dreams. This city of thirty dreams is called Thurfoemott. Perhaps that is the destiny Auroral River entrusted to them: to rely on the power of thirty people to turn their dreams into reality.

IV

According to the prophecy of an alchemist (unfortunately, I do not know the relationship between alchemy and prophecy), Bumas will become the greatest city of mathematics of all time, from which all kinds of mathematical geniuses will be born. The people rejoiced, and everyone who listened to the alchemist's prophecy was convinced that their child would be that genius. So looking in through the irregular glass windows of the square stone houses and tin cabins of Bumas, you could see the seven-year-old struggling with Apollonius circles, the eight-year-old tangling with conic curves, and the nine-year-old facing a paper full of matrix equations in despair. I'm sorry to say that I can't even find words to describe the questions on the Bumas exam to you - who knows what those dead spider-like symbols are! -So the people of Bumas were extraordinarily equal, all went to the same schools, received the same salaries, and were the same imbeciles, and the kids handed in the same blank math exam papers except for their names. Then there was indeed a seven-year-old child who scored 20 points in a math paper of 150, sending a shock wave through the whole town, but it's a shame that the child died of fever the next year. Despite the hard work and credible prophecy, by the time I arrived in Bumas, excluding that landmark child in it's history, the town had yet to produce even one mathematical genius.

"Maybe there is no genius in our generation, but don't worry, he must be in our next generation." So said the people of Bumas.

"Your Immortality, you should try to imagine such a city," said L'étranger, "where everything is dazzling white under the daylight, as if it were built with white chocolate. The city would melt every midnight, becoming a torrent of white that carries everything, and in an instant solidifies into new shapes, forming a new city, and people also get new things. Everything melts away as the clock strikes twelve and is given a new meaning again."

"If all I need is to imagine, then why am I here listening to all your useless stuff?" the King asked, "If I can fantasize about everything you told me, why should I listen to you?"

"All stories grow out of fantasy, too," said L'étranger, "but people still read them and listen to storytellers. It is not the story itself that endows the meaning, but the narrative of a certain narrator. What I tell is either a fantasy or a real experience. Maybe they are nothing more than fantasies, but I am convinced that they exist, and so they do exist."

"I am the king of Alagadda. If I want a city to be, it will be; if I don't, it will immediately vanish. But you are not a king, so how can you do all this? Merely to think doesn't make any sense; once the fantasy falls into nothingness, then it certainly not exist in the past, nor in the present, and let alone the future."

"Your Immortality, I can say that my journey took place in the past and also in the present, and at this moment when I look up at your sacred face, I can also say that it's in the future: as long as fantasy is still planted on the fertile soil of reality, it will come up sooner or later at some time. This is true, but I also know that 'time' is ridiculous to the Immortality, so I have to say that I'm speaking of something that crawls out from the gap between existence and non-existence. I believe that I speak of something that exists and does not exist at the same time, that is to say, a dream. And so like the construction of Thurfoemott, the dream will be transformed into reality, the magic reality, like the village of Pisigulito, Macondo or the Gaomi Township in Shandong. Probably that's why you are willing to listen further."

"I can visualize a world," said the King, "where two plus two does not equal four."

"Oh, come on, I don't think so." said L'étranger.

The King figured out one thing: listening to the narrative of L'étranger was the best way to comprehend things. To imagine out of void is like looking at a dewdrop on a flower across a triple mountain range, too tiny and indistinct; and when one really squats in front of the flower to observe the dewdrop carefully, the dewdrop will be magnified and magnified again, deformed into a little imperfect bump, making one forget everything outside it, in which case, you know nothing but the dewdrop. The only time everything becomes clear was when being enveloped by the thin mist.

V

I have twice visited Morial, a city that has re-echoed beside my ears since my childhood.

Morial was once known for its abundance and wealth, and later for its unbelievable decline. - But apparently, in today's memory, Morial no longer exists. Even in the memory of travellers, it is only a vague image. The real Morial; the naked Morial; the invisible Morial; the capital of wealth; the capital of desire; the capital of decay.

By the time I first arrived in Morial, it had become a kind of legend and one of many symbols of opulence, while the city itself seemed to have long disappeared like Sodom. Heaven knows how I found my way into Morial, and I have no memory of how I got there: I just spent three days and nights wandering through withered woods shrouded in sea fog, and found a city in front of me. I wouldn't have believed this was Morial without the large golden letters on the road signs. There were still traces of the glorious days that could be found. I remembered that there were three kinds of roads: cobblestone, bluestone and granite; I remembered that there were three kinds of floor tiles in the houses: lapis lazuli, marble and celadon; I remembered the exquisite frescoes and mosaics in the churches, and the zenith inlaid with cat eye, serpentine and blood stone. But these are not the main things, what was engraved in my memory was the ubiquitous moss in the city. They grew in every crevice, even between the teeth of residents, and even the air was filled with a faint green smell. The faces of the people were quite thin, showing the first sign that famine had already appeared, but I didn't stay long before I left, without any foreknowledge of what would happen in Morial after that.

The second time I arrived in Morial, it had faded because the people had eaten away its color. It hadn't seen traders or caravans for years, its food was running out day by day, and its life was reduced to waiting day after day. They will come tomorrow, right? Maybe not. Maybe they will never come. At that time of the year Morial has 298 magnificent memorials, and in the lingering sunlight of the dusk skinned pedestrians walk around the corners, being dragged away by other skinned hands just the second they collapsed. Famine was forcing people to evolve toward termites. They bit into the yellow sponge leaking from the sofa, unable to stop even though their throats are almost torn; they bit into the intricately constructed sandalwood window panes, whose infused aroma encouraged them to keep eating; they even bit into the long-expired soap abandoned in the corners of basements, whose warm taste made them cry out in gratitude as they chewed. As for the story of the pedestrians, O Great King of Alagadda, I have just told you about that: a few pieces of flesh could make people's eyes red with savage, and half a loaf of moldy bread is enough to cause bloodshed in fratricidal fights. However, there was still incredible miracles in this purgatory city, where the countless gems were still set in place, and would shine in glory again when being wiped, just as vivid as the scenes of famine around them. So Morial is not a city, but just one of the many images I am telling you about.

VI

I don't like Tottesla very much, it's too small and too remote - but that's what makes it so unique. Not many people have been there, it is as inaccessible as the Auroral River, as elusive as Shangri-La, and maybe you will fall into it when you are cleaning something that is stuck in a drawer. Tottesla is in a small space (or universe?) with an unknown entrance and is no bigger than any city you've ever seen, and the city alone takes up half of this small space, surrounded by only a few patches of fields, two rivers and a lake. The citizens of Tottesla call it the City of Eternal Daylight, because it is constantly illuminated by warm light and can't been cut off by clouds even it's raining hard, while the rest of the world is shrouded in eternal darkness.

Tottesla never knows what time is; it doesn't know any unit of time, and everyone acts only according to the biological clock. You can certainly imagine the hustle and bustle of the streets of Tottesla: the coming and going of buses that push pedestrians against the walls, the incessant tide of sound that rushes in the air. And Tottesla is also silent beneath the dust of noise: a young couple cuddling up to each other in a whisper, doing lovely frolics in the pretend darkness of drawn curtains. If there were outliers, they too could set up tents and build houses in the perpetual darkness of the wilderness outside the city, buy their monthly supplies from the city, and live in peaceful seclusion in the pale darkness that spreads across the sky. - (Anyone can find a way of life they love in Tottesla and find the similar souls, even if they were out of touch with the world in the past.) - There is no solitude in Tottesla.

So in my opinion, Tottesla is a boring city. It has all the characteristics of a happy city, full, joyous, bright, innocent, but not in a relationship with interest.

VII

PLorence, my mead of poetry, my rhyme of galaxy, the sigh uttered by my soul's loneliness, the mirage broken into my mind's fragments, my jade necklace, my holy sacrifice.

O wise and mighty King of Alagadda, please forgive me for not being able to tell you from which musician or composer these words came, but you must have felt what a magnificent place of art and music PLorence was. According to my old-timers, all musicians and composers must make a pilgrimage to PLorence once in their lifetime, otherwise, no matter which god they worship (Jehovah, Mithra, Mekhane, or even you, your Immortality.) , they cannot call themselves musicians when they walk on the road to meet their gods after they die, they cannot even say they are ordinary music players.

If I had to pick one of the places I've been to that I miss the most, the place that I miss so much that I will revisit it again and again in my dreams, it would have to be PLorence, because it was born with all the beautiful musical sounds of ten thousand worlds - everything is a piece of music of its own. PLorence's country is Beethoven's Country, the earth is Mahler's Earth, the lake is Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, the rustling of the leaves is like a tune leaking through piano keys, the splashing of the river is like a melody playing upon violin strings. I was moved to tears when I arrived in PLorence, believing that I must had known PLorence before: the buildings took all kinds of wonderful shapes, the singing wind chimes hung on the door of every house, and the gentle wind blew the sails of the windmills, playing music with the countless local bands - pervading its fresh air.

Yet at some point, PLorence disappeared, and no one ever found it again, but is remained forever in the memory of the travellers. The pessimistic elders believe that this means that the music will one day die out and that this day is not far, the knowledgeable wise men claim that the demise of PLorence is the inevitable result of the post-modernization of the traditional countryside, and the younger generation even questions its existence. But for me, I would rather believe the legend that an old grandmother coaxed her grandson: PLorence, surrounded by the most magnificent and beautiful music, went up to the sky, and is still rising to this day.

VIII

Try to imagine again, this time a wilderness, from the sky to the land, from the beginning to the end, from the center to the border, everything is snow-white, and that place is Symboria, a place that is composed of three symbols: barren, cold and white, so it is a wilderness without any vegetation, even the sunlight is freezing, and the ground is covered with snow for a long time, maybe for ever, so long that if you sweep the snow off the rocks, you will find that the rocks have been bleached white by the snow.

Sounds can't be heard in Symboria, because sounds are broken into fragmentary faint vibrations. If you speak to another person, he will only feel as if there are many cobwebs on his or her face: in Symboria, words are powerless; everything is so calm and hard that if there is no disturbance from the native creatures, everything will adopt a determined, unshakable pose. Even the air seems to be made of diamond, and a gust of wind can shatter the glass into countless regular pieces. Thus, no one knows the symbols of the body better than the Symborian: they never talk through any vibration, but give meaning to their gestures by the angle of their eyelids, the shape of their mouths, and even the curl of their eyelashes; no animal is closer to a miracle than the creatures of Symboria: the Symborian fish swim in the ice that has been frozen for trillions of years, and the Symborian birds nest in the hard basaltic formations that have been formed somehow. Is there a place on your grand map, O King, that has anything like Symboria?

In search of my lost time, I have left Symboria for so long. No, you are wrong, I don't miss it at all, no one would miss such a place. I remember it because I doubt my own memory. I can't believe in myself: is it really possible for a place like Symboria to exist, a place made merely of three pure symbols? Is there really a place so monotonous and unique? Maybe memory is simplifying and subtracting, turning Symboria from a noun to an adjective, or maybe it's exaggerating and adding, sweeping away the smallest details. And so the question comes back to 'existence' - but as I've said that whether existence or not doesn't matter! So, then - speak, memory.

Lips clenching on the pipe's green glass stem, the King dozed off, and the endless hall shivered with the his even breathing. The creamy sun shone through the glass, casting a strange shade of green on the face of L'étranger, who was standing long without taking a seat, his face dried up like the skin of a dead eagle, his body shrunken in the cloak of shadow. The King opened his eyes and stared at the figure of L'étranger, trying to distinguish him from the shadows, and finally saw but only a miserable green face, the king yawned and asked, "Where did you come from? Where are you going to? To here were you going. From there did you come."

"I'm from Neverwhere" L'étranger laughed, "And I'm going to Neverwhere, too."

"Where is Neverwhere? You haven't told me what that place is. Tell me something about it."

"It never be 'where' . I can't tell anything about it. Neverwhere is Neverwhere. At the time when nothingness ruled the existence, a pardon was given to the fiction that should have died, so that everything was able to appear on earth. Your country Alagadda has another name called Neverland, and your neighbour country is called Nevermeant, which are two examples. And Neverwhere can be regarded as the third, which allows the narrative to rule my vision and that of Your Immotality's, and what I tell is what you will see. But Neverwhere - I just can't tell."

"What a strange stranger! Who are you? Whoever you are." The king asked, confused.

"I am the narrator of the tale. I tell and tell and make Your Immortality remember something." L'étranger replied.

"What is your name?"

"I don't have a name. A name is a thing like a symbol, so as the narrator of the tale, you and I must abandon our names, at least we shouldn't have one in my narrative, because the narrator must be different from Symboria."

"Your Immortality, you think we are also parts of what I tell," L'étranger took a step closer, the miserable green shadow disappeared from his face, the area where his face should be was a dizzying blur, and the King felt his colourless and odourless breath, "but no, we are not, you and I are the existents outside of the story, do you think I am the only narrator? It is you that decide what the next story will be and create it, not me."

The King said, "In that case, you can just give me complete authority to create, and instead of telling your journey, you can tell my dream. I know that you have been standing and staring at my face while I was just napping, so come and tell my dreams, and you can read from my face - though maybe you can't see it at all - what you should tell. I have four dreams, and those are the stories of four performance artists.

L'étranger said, "Why do you need to mention anything about 'authority to create'? You (perhaps) still haven't understood the role we play. I only narrate in order to satisfy the your desire to narrate. But if you had ordered me to bark, I would have had to obey - and since you have so requested, Your Immortality, let me tell you."

IX

The first performance artist, whose name is Brunius Bruniuswool Ernst, you could hear in his footsteps the sound of his body and soul (oh, it's so heavy.) . In stature, this was a José Arcadio-type figure: he was three meters tall, his body is gnarled with huge muscles, covered with fine tattoos, and circular pattern of nine nymphs holding hands and singing in unison was traced next to his large genitals. He never wore clothes, because he believed in the beauty of nakedness. In his short life of only thirty-three years old he completed many works of art that with mixed comments, and none of other works was more shocking than the siege hammer.

Let's put Brunius aside for a moment and talk about something else, otherwise it would be impossible for me to understand the amusing sexual imagery in this story. I'm going to talk about Trakeyalan, a small town on the lower Sade River, known for its production of sex slaves. It did not perish with Sodom and Gomorrah in those days, probably because its name was not as catchy as the latter two and could not make such a strong impression on future generations, and finally escaped. The people of Trakeyalan were available as a unit, where love was sold at a price, kisses were sold with a trademark, and sexiness were sold in packages. One could easily find the kind of woman or man on the street that you would like to follow him north in the backseat of an electric bike in slippers and baggy pajamas. It was a city whose image was determined by desire, sometimes desire made it old, and sometimes made it young.

And one day Brunius came leaping from the mountains - that was the beginning of an artistic creation that shocked the whole world. The son of Ernst leaped over a mountain after another in a proud manner, carrying a huge phallus of the length and thickness of a siege hammer in his powerful arms, the giant in such a strange shape was bloodied and ready to penetrate. When Brunius reached the gates of Trakeyalan, he raised this symbol of male high and slammed it hard into the gates. At the first blow, the gates let out a dull gasp; at the second, they let out a wild groan; and at the third, they opened wide, and the air resounded with the scream of the gates shattering, right to the end of the Sade River. Brunius, holding this creation as if it belonged to the Creator, smashed the lewd and evil city of Trakeyalan, and went away in front of the horror of the whole world and the anger of those with a vested interest in feeding on sex. The bloodied siege hammer once on his shoulder is still standing in the middle of the Sad River like a victor's banner, still displaying desire and non-desire in an absurd gesture of never compromising, and still looking out over the lustful years of a millennium and one.

X

Talos von Esposito is the second name of the performance artist. He never actually devoted his life to art, but the only major decision of his life was enough to bring him into the pantheon of great performance artists. He was born an ordinary, lovely baby, lying in a spotless white blanket (a completely spotless blanket), with his parents and relatives gathered around his tiny cradle, praising how cute and smart he was - little did these people know what little Talos would do eighteen years later. Young Talos was a healthy child, and in a few years became a tall, lean, handsome young man, always dressed in formal clothes, and with a lifelong love of spotless things - blank paper and new towels.

He refused to join the glorious ranks of manhood in the year of his eighteenth with his own identity and countenance. Instead, by the time the birthday party and coming-of-age day ceremony were over, Talos returned to his room and picked up a nice white candle. He lit the candle and then melted his face. In the flickering white candlelight, Talos smoothed out the melted features with his hands until his entire face was flat, no longer possessing the few holes and bumps called eyes, ears, mouth and nose, smooth as a newborn baby's skin. After a week his entire face became pure white: as spotless as a piece of blank paper.

So Talos von Esposito rejected the world on the day he turned eighteen, and since then the only emotion that can be read on his face was blankness. In my eyes, Talos had the great gift of being a narrator, because a narrator's first task is to give the story to the narrative but not to himself, so that my face and yours may also be blank and vague, and if he could get rid of the shackles of the name in this story, as we do, probably he could become the third person among us. But in the eyes of others, Talos is no less than a freak: when he went camping in the woods, he was more than once mistaken for a ghost by passing travellers, which in turn causes panic. He was unable to get along with people, and when others tried to talk to him, they often looked at his blank but spotless face and were often speechless, to this end, perhaps even if Talos von Esposito was allowed to go to Tottesla, he would also be alone.

He sincerely believed that after he died, he would lie in a coffin, which would be decorated with white lilies, campanulas and orange blossoms, both inside and outside, and people would bury him in a fragrance of white, so that the whole underworld would be left with only him, and white.

XI

In his eyes people were no different from pigeons, in his eyes buildings were no different from pigeonholes, so his life was the life of a pigeon. Let me tell you his name: Luan Yuchen, the third performance artist in your dreams. When he was eight years old, he climbed on the roof to play, and his mother saw it and scolded him under the roof, "Why are you acting like a pigeon? From that moment on he was deeply aware of the similarity between man and pigeon, rather, man and pigeon have always been the same thing.

Many years later as he faced the approaching death, Luan closed his eyes slowly like a sleeping pigeon and was to dimly remember that afternoon when he was scolded by his mother, the day he stopped talking, reading and watching television. That afternoon, he flew off the roof like a pigeon. When he was little he used to run his hands over his shoulder blades and make a clicking sound when he stretched, thinking he was going to grow wings, and then he could fly without them. He slept with his knees in arms on the drying rack and only flies out of the door when someone opened it, just like a pigeon. In the morning, when someone opened the door for him, he flew out with a flock of pigeons to enjoy the sunlight of the breaking dawn and returned at dusk. Sometimes he flew to a window and crouched on the frame, overlooking the gray cityscape; sometimes he flew with the pigeons to the orchard and stole grapes under the eyes of the farmers; sometimes he drank from the fountain in the square.

He could have lived better than anyone else if others hadn't ventured to obstruct him in any way - even if he had only begged for food from people in the square with the pigeons. He didn't ask for anything, because he knew that people (perhaps people used to be different, but modern people, no doubt, are pigeons, and willingly live the life of pigeons and live in pigeonholes.) is supposed to be like that.

XII

The gloomy cemetery was full of the smell of earth after the rain, that's your dream, the fourth one, and the performance artist is the owner of this cemetery, the one who guardrd the graveyard, buried the coffins, erected the tombstones and inscribes them, that's right, he was the only one who managed this huge cemetery, his name is Juan Mario Lispector Cartiero. If he was approached, he was the one who bought the coffins, finalized the graves, chose the stones and engraved the names and dates of birth and death. He could do all this work by himself, and he did it with ease. But if only one order came in a day, he won't do it, he had to wait for the second dead person to come.

He had been doing this since he started this funeral business: matching the dead into pairs of two or more, burying several people in each other's graves. Those should be done quietly, so that the family would not know, and then by lying about the location or changing the name to put the person in the wrong grave. He did not do that for any nefarious reason, just wanted to do so and then did it. He did not have a little bit of guilty sense in his heart when doing those, he thought very clear: there were many people who came to the cemetery, both old and young, and at some point in their lives (the day was bound to come), he would know more dead people than living people, but the location of the dead is not so important, so what he did won't make any difference. He watched as people coming to visit the graves of their loved ones stepped over the rain-soaked marble steps, holding umbrellas and putting offerings in front of the wrong graves. There were some words that he always wanted to say to his patrons, but always ended up not saying:

"What the dead are like is defined by the living. That is to say, there is not a single grave nor a single dead person that is not deceitful."

The hall in front of the throne kept changing as the King's thoughts ebbed and flowed, and various figures and objects disappeared and reappeared: the slave girl in chains, the white tie with tuberose, the birdcage containing a dozen people, the gray tombstone: Diego Garcia Iscavino, August 9, 1907 to May 15, 1968.

The King asked, "If you can describe the characters and events of my dream so precisely, can you tell me what meaning the dream carries? Are they omens?"

"Your Immortality, I cannot interpret your dreams," replied L'étranger, "to the stuffs called illusions and dreams, their author died the moment he stopped writing, and so are given a chaotic character. The chaotic poly-synthesis leads to its unresolved nature. Just like merely knowing that a man is walking on the road alone, I cannot tell you for sure whether he is going to work, buying fish food or visiting his mistress. I can guess what you are thinking: to invite these four artists to come to Alagadda, and to give a black mask to Cartiero, a white mask to Esposito, a yellow mask to Luan, and a red mask to Ernst, just like you had the court jester do in the old days. And to prevent the wandsmen from poking their long noses around, they were also intended to be packaged as victims of past political conflicts. I do know what you're thinking, but what do these things mean to you? The answer would be beyond me to know."

The King said, "In your talk about whether existence or non-existence does not matter, you are mistaken, for existence and non-existence are not objective. When you desire to be real, everything exists; when you only want to dream, nothing exists. We're all here, and we're quite close to the end. We've been dreaming for too long."

L'étranger said, "For an ordinary person, it's good to realize that it's all a dream, to understand that everything is good, and then to willingly live in the dream. But you have a different perspective and are always imposing the uniqueness of being a king: you look for things in dreams that are not dreams, name them existence, and command them to be."

"Then you will be king for a while." The King rose trembling and spread his hands, chains rattling, "You come to listen and I'm going to speak. I speak and you listen as you come and I go.Listen, listen to me now, by me to add an ending to the story."

XIII

Let's start with a hearsay story, and for the sake of narration, let's use the first person. - In this tale, this Mister 'I' has a stupid sister. It's telltale tale.

When I was young and naughty, it's my sister that was responsible for taking care of me. At a very young age I learned how to ride on my sister's head and take advantage of her, after all, I was still a kid and she was an adult, and if she bullied me, she would be lectured by Mom.

I'm going to tell you about that time: I did something so big that she got mad and cried and said she was going to hang herself. At first I didn't take it seriously, but then I saw her run to her bedroom, climb on a chair, grab a bed sheet and roll it into a rope and hang it from the ceiling with her neck in the noose. Still scared, I rushed over and tried to pull her down. She reached out and pushed me but failed. I seized her clothes, said a few words of comfort, untie the rope sleeve, and help her down from the chair. My brain seemed to be at a standstill at that moment, without thinking or the ability to think, just like a blank sheet of paper. I dragged her to my room.

I stammered out a few words of apology and sat on the edge of the bed. She was half slumped in the leather chair, leaning against the cushion, with little sparkle in her eyes, and didn't seem to be listening at all and didn't say anything. I squeezed her hand and kept rubbing it, feeling anxious. I tried to stare at her face again and found that she was pale and her expression was stiff, unlike a living person, and I became more and more afraid. When I was in a state of confusion, there was a sound of something fell on the floor from her room. I jumped in fright and tried to pull my hand out, but she grabbed it. I looked down to see her, and suddenly her face had a human look again, her eyes were full of fear. She gently grabbed my hand, opened her mouth slightly, tried to say something but couldn't, so she shook her head gently. I was so scared and confused that as soon as I withdrew my hand out with force, I rushed out of my room and ghosted towards hers: I didn't even understand why I would want to find out what was going on.

I ran to the white wooden door of her bedroom when I suddenly felt something trip under my feet and fell over. I looked up in confusion, then I saw the chair lying to the floor and my sister hanging from the ceiling with a sheet wrapped around her neck, her eyes wide open, her face purple and her tongue hanging out. She was dead.

You should have understood by now, my dear little king in the black cloak, that reality is as unstable as narrative, and is as fractured and fragmented. No, the fragmentation does not come from the narrative. It comes from reality. Reality is to be realized.

XIV

I, too, have personally waged many wars in early years. I have conquered many cities: cities that moved on land, cities that floated on water, cities that flew in the sky. These cities are all very common to me, but one of them is always more impressive, and I still remember it today. I don't know what that city was called in its strange language, but I loved it and called it Berg. A very listenable pronunciation. Berg. Greb. B-E-R-G. G-R-E-B.

Berg is a city that is constantly divided, like a cell, in a constant state of fragmentation and turmoil, only it doesn't expand without others' help. It takes little effort to capture the city, except that no one ever wants to capture it, because endless murders, betrayals and gang splits happen every day there, even if you drain the city of its old blood and replace it with new blood of your own. Since time immemorial, Berg has not been loyal to its owners, it has rebelled, double-crossed or declared independence, and every moment of its existence it has tried to divide itself from the whole. Berg itself is also fragmented, even the trees in the city have only dead branches, and when viewed from below the sky is divided into fragmented pieces. The city shattered into many pieces like a vase that fell to the ground, splitting into countless oddly shaped and sized towns until every home became a single town. At that point, the Bergan would wake up again and start ganging up again until the whole city was unified - and then plunge back into the next fragmentation.

I asked myself, "Why did I conquer Berg?"

A Bergan heard me and replied, "Because fragmentation and unity are two sides of the same piece of paper, and no knife can separate them. If one day Berg disappears from your vast empire, a new Berg will be born in the remaining cities. For every monarch, Berg has always been there, only the names keep changing."

XV

Drink a glass of swan blood with wine (the blood of a black-necked swan taken from the south!)! It's good for you. If you choose to live in Arnalds, you will get used to it and drink it every day. Arnaldsian love the habit thing and every day of their life is almost the same. Arnaldsian life can be described as a mountain of snow, piled up by a snowflake of daily routine and habit. Year after year they built fortifications for Arnalds, laying out barbed barriers everywhere, fortifying the walls, arranging shooting spots one after another, and thus declaring their city indestructible. The city's vast expanse and rich produce were enough for them to be self-sufficient, so except for sending envoys from time to time to seek knowledge from the outside world, Arnalds was willing to isolate itself from the world. World also isolated itself from it.

But all this was of no use before me, my command is beyond reproach, my army is invincible. No matter what they did, they couldn't stop the soldiers from rushing to the city and smashing their self-proclaimed unbreakable gates with four-hundred-ton siege hammers - in fact, they were no better than paper gates in front of my hammers. Then we were surprised to pour into the great city, which had not been revealed to the world for many years, to find that all the Arnaldsian had fled the city in a hurry. And Arnalds was still in that moment when everyone lived in peace and happiness and everything hung in the balance, when the musical instruments in the bars still hovered in the air and played themselves, when the heads of freshly cut deer refused to die before their owners returned, gasping and bleeding black and foul, and when the looms worked freely without human hands, pushing out sheets of silk. I stayed in a vineyard at that night, and when I came out for a walk the next morning, I saw scissors fly up automatically to cut bunches of grapes, while they moved through the air for a while and dropped themselves into the basket. As a city, Arnalds is ridiculously stubborn: although the Arnaldsian have left and we could do whatever we wanted, yet everything in Arnalds is still obstinately disobedient to whatever we did.

They are still slaves to old habits, and do not want to change masters: they refuse to push on unless it's on their daily basis.

XVI

I'm tired of telling you about this place and that place like you do. Maybe it's better if I tell you a story, no, just a scene, a sketch. That scene was like a dream. It was before I create Alagadda with my own hands. It was the memory of a crooked-necked tree, years before all dreams.

Hanging on withered tree, body stiff, can not move, in front of my eyes hovered flock after flock of red-eyed crows, some even landed on the dead branch hanging me, and fly away with flutters of wings, making branch wobbled. Because I was already dead, my eyes stiffened, always staring ahead, the gaze is of dead silence. These crows laughed in front of my eyes, refused to leave, and still hover in the hall (Do you see them? You see? See!). The dead branches bent under my weight, my head tilted down a little, and then I saw a smoky gray figure. That was you. (L'étranger, this Mister You is not referring to you.) You were that. You just stood there looking at me the whole time, your features simplified into three lines, blending with the black and white dead landscape behind you, refusing to put me down. I was hanging from a decaying, rotting tree, and you were standing on a desolate, dead hillside, with an endless, dead, gray-white sky above us. My eyes were full of unexpressed longing, longing for you to put me down, longing for the joy of the living, but you did not. So I waited quietly, no longer longing and no longer hoping that you would free me from death: you stood there looking at me quietly, refusing to make a decision: to put the king, who was nothing, down from the tree. You didn't even think of saving me, did you? You left me to die in the wilderness, to be pecked at by noisy red-eyed crows - and yet you made me king of Alagadda. I have learned from you the only type of nothingness I know. Kind is the nothingness.

Until the day the branch cracked.

The hall of black and red was silent, only the talking of the King and L'étranger could be heard, the slightest murmur of the outside world seemed unable to enter here.

"More and more unlike a story, I should say, this story has deviated from its initial image." L'étranger said, "It's too messy."

The King said, "According to your theory, all fantasies gradually go to chaos in the narrative. Perhaps I am still fit to listen, and you are fit to tell, and the narrator and receiver of the story should not be reversed. It does seem that we have strayed from the theme of the beginning - telling many stories that are not about the place where the map ended."

"The library of the Wanderers has many maps stored in it, each attempting to depict every corner of the multiverse. But actually they are not yet far from finished, there are still too many unknown frontiers. We can't see that much yet. Rather, the string of images I'm trying to tell is just a flicker of a long light in the mist."

"One day it will be ended, in the end." the King said ambiguously. "Right now both the center and the border of this map are Alagadda."

But L'étranger said to himself as if he had not heard: "… The map grows and annihilates at the same time, and with the infinite extension of the future comes the infinite decline of the past. Preserve them with words, like a slate topography, like the high-speed photography of a strobe camera, to record all these traces of change. The past, as an imagery, is equal to the future."

The King said, "If the map grows and annihilates indefinitely, then its home, the border of existence is undoubtedly Alagadda."

L'étranger said, "Alagadda is already here, it is never - the Neverland." He went on saying, "If the Never is bound to come, then the it will never exist only in the future; it is already here. Yet there can't be only neverlands on the map. It is like … What is the point of your evil if there is never a single good thing that happens on this earth? Where would narrative trickery come from if there were no multifaceted reality?"

"But the map shall end someday, and there will be no place where the map ended, which means there's nowhere beyond the map. Containing everything from the past to the present, there is no remainder. Neverland. Neverwhere—Never mind."

"If there is, then it has come. Nothingness is everything, but everything is more than nothingness — you just wait and see.Can you see?"

L'étranger sat down without the King's permission, and the King squinted his eyes and sniffed the scent of dried flowers in the air. They heard the clamor of merchants from everywhere, including, of course, from the place where the map ended. They heard a group of traders and customers walking together, singing joyful carols, setting off fireworks in the city of Alagadda, blooming stars in the yellow sky. They heard the tumultuous music of the band and the sound of people having fun, as if they were attending a masquerade. All this seemed to announce to the King that the endless map had an end, and that the places outside the map would never vanish. Those wonderful images and sounds haunted the King's heart and mind.

And so the King said, "I see it. I see."