Of the Antique Verulian culture, when her banners yet shimmered with starlight dyes and her rooftops caught the breath of winged lovers who danced between marble columns—soaring, sighing, barely tethered by gravity or shame. Riatt, the Splendid, the Eternal, the jewel crusted onto the brow of the desert queen, whose eyes men painted with crushed lapis, whose breath perfumed the dunes. It was a place whose beauty did not invite—it compelled. Where amber wine sluiced from the navels of priestesses not in revelry, but as part of rites whose meaning was long forgotten, only the sensation remained.
The fruit hung low in strange geometric orchards, ripening too fast, rotting too slowly, sweet to the point of delirium. The laughter of tan, bare-breasted women echoed not with joy, but with something else—something ritual, something rehearsed. Her towers, they say, were built by memory—stone coaxed into impossible curves by hands that once knew stars from beneath, and missed them. Riatt did not rise. Riatt manifested—a flowering from the marrow of the earth. The very air above her shimmered with dreamfire. Its domes were carved not by craftsmen but by forgotten commands still embedded in the sub-thought of ancient matter. Songs shaped them, yes—but no human mouth had ever sung those notes. Not properly. Children were born with silver eyes and teeth too many, said to whisper at night in spells even the eunuch scribes feared to write. Dancers moved with hips that defied mortal angles.
Even their shadows would not fall where they should. Time inside the Library of Bone was not stable. Mirrors blinked when unattended. And the moon over Riatt was said to have turned its face away—not in shame, but fear. O, how she feigned decadence! Silk veils and gold coins were only her skin. Beneath that skin, she pulsed with secrets—pregnant with arcana, exhaling soft vapors that made men dream of gods with backward hands. The eunuch flutists were carved from something before marble. No one knew by whom. They never moved, but always played. Her waters did not reflect. Her cats stared too long. Her libraries remembered. Even the birds—bright, lizard-eyed, cruel-throated—spoke only to warn. There were gardens where no one walked, and they thrived.
There were towers that grew taller when unobserved. And when the wind passed through the high gates of Riatt, it did not emerge as wind, but as sound, shaped and knowing. She was the bride of all magics. The high priest of tongues. The unsleeping mirror. She was the city that cast no shadow at noon, for even the sun lingered upon her breast—not in adoration, but in compulsion. No other city has claimed so many names, nor shed them with such reptilian ease.
She did not keep history. She bled it. And to those who now walk among her ossified beauty, her derelict dreams, her charnel silk—know this: Riatt was never a place for the real. She was an accident of desire, a cathedral of hallucinations made manifest. You do not study Riatt. You survive her. You do not remember her. She remembers you.
