A chunk of rock hurtles through space, circling a bright orange sun. It is accompanied on this endless cosmic voyage by its twin moons, though they are meagre companions in the cold of the void, separated by a great expanse of Nothing. Once, it was covered in life; now, it is an echo of its former self, a dead rock alone but for other dead rocks. Well. Not entirely alone; just as the presence of those cold and empty moons might make the world all the more lonely for their bitter presence, so too might the existence of the Low City hurt more than if there was truly nothing left on the surface but ghosts and weeds. Ever moving, but only in circles, alone but for the lonely, the Low City is a microcosm of the world itself, a synecdoche. All the way down to the detail that there are other worlds out there who care little for the plight of this dead little rock for its loneliness, for its failures. As above, so below, the world moves in cycles and so do its residents, all of this has happened before and will happen again- ah. Well, that may be overstating the similarities, actually. Because while the world into which the Low City is dug may have distant cosmic cousins indifferent to its very existence, the Low City’s cousin is much closer at hand. And it is anything but indifferent.

 

On the far side of the world, far beyond the awareness of anyone in the so called “last city in the world”, there is life. The Far City is… not much like the Low City. For starters, it isn’t really a city- not in the same way that the Low City is. It is a geographically dense accumulation of life, and it is partly subterranean, but that is where the similarities end. Because one of the defining characteristics of the Low City is its diversity, its greatest strength and, sometimes, the source of its troubles. That is a place where difference can be seen everywhere one looks, in size and shape and ideology most of all. The Low City is many things, but it is not united. And unity is the defining feature of The Far City: unity of form, of thought, of purpose. The Low City exists for its own sake, for the nebulous and shifting purpose that can best be defined as its own self-perpetuation, and that is a purpose that takes many forms and many paths. The Far City exists for one purpose, and one purpose alone: to reach out, through the dead soil of this not-so-dead world, and crush the Low City like a head in a vice. 

 

The Far City began, as it continues to be, in a much different form to the Low City. Where the Low City began as a mine, a hole in the ground which was then turned into a city, the Far City began from the smallest of beginnings: a single seed, embedded into the soil in a time before the Grib crawled out of their swamps, before the Skiterlings had feathers. From that seed grew something like a tree, and from that tree grew more seeds, and so such things tend to go. But there was something different about this tree, these seeds. Or rather, the roots that they grew: strange roots, that grew wide and deep, twisting and knotting together into something quite unlike any other plant to have ever existed. In this way, the Far City is both tree and forest in one, a vast organism that is not quite a single being and not quite a group. An evolutionary accident that has never been preceded nor replicated- though the shared consciousness of the Golnur comes closer than most- the Far City has grown and grown, covering a significant portion of the continent on which it grows, stretching outward on the surface and forever twisting into itself below. Trees that are not trees, a forest which is not a forest, because they are both and neither at the same time. 

 

With growth has come increased complexity, as is the case with most things. And yet the Far City remains, fundamentally, a tree, a forest. The original tree from which it first grew likely died long ago, but the roots from which it first spread live on, the chemical impulses that made it grow and thrive echoing throughout its being, throughout the ages. It does not have arms with which to grasp out at the world, it does not have legs with which to spread itself: it has branches, and roots, and as you might expect these things move slowly. It does not have much in the way of competition, however, little to challenge it, and so it is content to be slow, to be a being of millenia rather than days. Indeed, it has little awareness of time passing, and what awareness it does possess would seem confused to an outsider’s mind- if they could even begin to comprehend what passes for the Far City’s mind. Its roots tangle back and forth across thousands of kilometres, tracing back and forth, ancient gnarls overlapping with fresh young shoots, and so is the way with its comprehension of the world: some of it has only just come into being, whereas some of it still lives in the primeval age into which it was first planted. But although some parts of the Far City are younger than others, it is as a whole very old indeed. It is inflexible, determined, certain, in a way that only the ancient can be, and in a way that the Low City, for all its faults, is not. The Far City has changed enormously as it has grown and spread, but it has also stayed the same, in no small part because it did not have to change.

 

But then the world ended. The Far City is unaware of precisely what happened- even more so than the Low City, as it has no eyes to see the reddening sky- but it felt the change- continues to feel it- in its roots, in the changing quality of light that falls on its leaves, in the strange new minerals and contaminants that are absorbed by its roots. And with those external changes came internal ones, as the nutrients and… other things that the Far City took into itself brought something of this new world into the Far City’s being. It was a slow change, one of many centuries and one which was aided by the more mundane environmental adaptations of that place- a dying back of surface flora as the energy cost of supporting them began to outstrip that which they brought in, a reallocation of biomass to the subterranean- but it was a change which has come to define the Far City. Because before the world ended, the Far City was merely a strange and convoluted plant, a forest that was a tree and a tree that was a forest: a curiosity to any ecologists who might have discovered it, but otherwise not worthy of much attention. After the end of the world, it was… is… something else. Something that can think. 

 

The Far City does not think like you do, or like an Umbressi or Lesh does. It does not think like anything else in the world- and, indeed, it may not be accurate to say that it thinks at all. Rather, it has a thought: a single thought that began some time after the changes wrought by the world’s end began to take hold, a thought of many parts that continues to grow like the roots that support it. In some ways, the thought is the Far City itself, the closest thing it has to a consciousness, a decision-making capability. It is that thought which drives it to grow, to spread its roots deep, deep into the soil, which drives it to change those roots so that they can stretch further from their source and seek out cracks in the bedrock to tunnel further still, to survive at pressures unimaginable to any other plant in existence. It is that thought which has led it to the Low City, to encircle it in roots, and begin the long, long process of choking the life out of it like a vine chokes a tree. That is the thought that has occupied what passes for the Far City’s mind for all these years, the thought of many parts that has guided all of its actions- not through animus, or even really by choice, but simply by the logic of nature, of self-preservation. Because the Far City knows, if it can be said to know anything, one thing above all else: that the Low City is the source of all its hardship, all of the changes it has been forced to overcome since it became what it is now.

 

The Far City is unique in many, many ways, clearly, but chief among these is that, unlike with any sapient species in existence, one can trace back through history to the point where it gained its ability to “think”, and comprehend- more or less- how this happened. The Far City came to its version of “thought” in the same way that any plant comes by anything else it requires to survive: it absorbed it. Where roots might absorb water and nutrients, or leaves might absorb sunlight, the Far City gained thought by absorbing… thoughts. Some strange quirk of nature, perhaps a mutation caused by the changing world or the mishap that changed it, the Far City became aware- if it can be said to be aware- of the thoughts of those around it. There were still people around at this point, of course, struggling on in the wake of the world’s end on the far side of the world from what was becoming the Low City, but they did not have a Low City in which to survive, and so over time they died out. But before they died out, they were noticed by the Far City, as they huddled in its forests and dug doomed shelters among its roots. The Far City was unable to communicate with them, unable to tell them of the gift they had granted it- if it can even be said to have known that it had been granted something new. Perhaps if they had survived longer the Far City would have grown more, become capable of greater thoughts, of different thoughts. But that is not the case. Instead, the Far City’s first thought, its only thought, was a garbled understanding of the thought that was ever on the minds of those people from whom it learned to think, as they died and were absorbed into its soil: a thought of who was responsible. 

 

The main populace of this part of the world, the part of the world which was unknowingly home to what would become the Far City, were Lesh of a sort. Crucially, a different sort to those who lived above what is now the Low City- cousins, perhaps, of the sort you don’t see often and prefer things that way. There was an animosity between them that ran deep, the kind that can only come from ancient grudges whose origins have long been forgotten. It was this grudge that led these Lesh to believe their distant cousins responsible for the calamity that killed them, to curse them with their final breaths. And it was that curse, sighed out among the changing roots of the Far City, that gave rise to that place’s first thought. Perhaps it is not even the Far City’s thought, in truth, but a thought it stole from the lips of the dead. But that matters little, because in the mind of the Far City that idea, the fact that these distant Lesh on the far side of the world are to blame for deaths that are not even its own… has taken root. And in the primordial, rigid view of a thing like the Far City, that means that these distant folk must die, lest they harm it again. It has not even been harmed, really- changed, certainly, but the harm for which it seeks revenge, whose repetition it seeks to prevent, was done to people it didn’t even really know existed until they were gone. Perhaps if it was capable of a second thought, things might have played out differently. But there was nobody left in its homeland to think for it, whose thoughts it could take as its own. It has traveled across the world and stayed in place at the same time, reaching out toward the Low City and its revenge over the course of centuries with roots that grow longer and stranger without end, without rest. 

 

Despite not knowing where the Low City was, despite not really knowing that the Low City existed, it was inevitable that the Far City would find it eventually. Not merely because it has all the time in the world, but for the sheer fact that the Low City is the only place in the world where there is still thought, and the Far City has- unbeknownst to what passes for itself- become quite sensitive to thoughts. It is utterly unaware of the existence of the Hohi, as they never come to land anywhere but the Low City, and so the Low City’s people and their thoughts act like a beacon, drawing the roots across the breadth of the planet like shoots seeking the sun. As the farthest roots reached the farthest outskirts of the Low City, the second part of the Far City’s thought began to unfold as a scheme it had unwittingly learned from the dead Lesh it had absorbed. The Far City’s mind had continued to evolve and change over the course of the roots’ journey, and where it had once been unable to communicate with those poor dead Lesh it had learned- though it did not know it had learned- to speak, in a manner of speaking. And, unconsciously, it used that ability to “speak” to make contact with members of the Low City’s underworld, a long-term scheme that began with some lucky souls being granted the chance to harvest some of its roots for their valuable materials, progressed to a network of contacts who would conduct espionage and uncover the secrets of the Low City Lesh, and finally culminate in a full-scale uprising and the assassination of the Lesh Ministry at the hand of a wooden doppelganger. The Far City learned the ways of Lesh espionage well, and there were some whispered suggestions among the Lesh Ministry that the tactics of their Adversary did seem… familiar, although of course none ever suggested anything so outlandish as to be close to the truth. From the far side of the world, a tree had conducted an intricate and devious scheme to subvert the government of a rival nation, with only a handful of poor disenfranchised souls ever making direct contact. The Far City was a ghost, the source of rumours and myths, some suspecting that there were Others out there conspiring against the Low City, some claiming that there was a rogue Lesh outpost operating from one of the moons… and the only people who knew anything close to the truth were abandoned souls who claimed they heard voices, and somehow always had some wood or paper to barter with. The long-dead foreign Lesh had gained their revenge, long after their deaths, without even knowing it. And the instrument of that revenge had achieved it without even really understanding what it did. It had acted on instinct, sought revenge as it would once have sought nutrients, grown a wooden Lesh body to strike down its enemy as it once might have grown a trunk to seek the sun, and spoken words into the minds of every soul still alive in the Low City in a voice that was not its own. It has no further words for the people of the Low City. It did not even truly know that it spoke all this time, does not know what the words “it is the greatest honour to be here” mean, does not know what the Low City is or that its people have taken to calling it the Far City. It has come to the end of its long, long thought, and its many parts.

 

And now, with the Lesh Ministry dead, with the Low City held in its wooden grasp, with the people it has sought to avenge itself upon staring throughout their homes at the roots which have just spoken to it, the Far City begins to form a second thought. What that thought will be, how long it will take to form, nobody knows. But whatever conclusions it comes to, what new course of action it chooses, it will no longer be acting alone. It has crossed a world, without knowing why, and now its fate, like its roots, has become inextricably linked with the Low City.