City of Brilliant Light

The seawater reached Arnould’s knees, cold and steady, drawing him further from the shore. The waves moved against him without rhythm or malice, shifting his balance but not deterring him. He did not resist them. His gaze remained fixed on the horizon, where sea and sky dissolved into one another.
With each step, Arnould moved further from the shore. The night still lay across the water, though its darkness no longer obscured his view. He stumbled more than once, but did not turn back. His gaze remained on the distant line where sea and sky met.

The water rose to his hips, cold and insistent. The tide moved around him without pattern or intention. His breath shortened, though whether from cold or depth he could not tell. He continued forward, feeling the resistance of the current against his limbs. His heart beat steadily as he lifted a hand toward the horizon.

As the coastline faded from view, the water reached his chest. The depth beneath him could no longer be measured. He felt the cold settle into him, not as pain, but as certainty. Moonlight lay faint across his face. His eyes did not waver.
“Take me there,” he said. The words did not carry far.
The next wave did not strike him. It passed over him. And the sea closed without haste.

The name was Arnould Adelaide. Saying Arnould was living or has lived a full life until this point would be an exaggeration. He has been confined to the bed since childhood – by frail bones, and, according to others, a frailer mind. Since the day he opened his eyes, an illness had kept him company. No one imagined he would travel far. Born in a small town along the northern coast, into a family of craftsmen, Arnould was regarded early as weight rather than kin. 

Beyond his frail and unusual body, there were moments when he seemed absent in mind as well – as though some part of him had stepped elsewhere. It was rarely condemned. But it was remembered. And memory altered how he was regarded.

Therefore for most of his life Arnoud has been living in the old attic of his family’s mansion. Rarely visited or paid attention to at all, he spent most of his time reading books and old records cast aside into the attic, left to fall to dust due to their unusual and seemingly unusable nature. Just as Arnould himself. Books and old records of tales about cities beyond horizons and places above the clouds, of everything other than human nature. Records written down by men said to have lost their minds to such lands.
Arnould did not care much about anybody’s appointed reputation in any way, as he himself had been referred to as a cursed child many times, amongst other things. All the authors of said records had gone ahead ages before Arnould’s lifetime, as he sometimes envied them for the places they had allegedly seen, and sometimes even for the places they may be now.

His most favoured document was the record of a seaman named Philleas Lambert. The record had been discovered in a shipwreck cast ashore by the merciless winter tides of the sea nearly a century before his time. It was nigh unto a miracle that the document survived the briny, tempestuous waters of those cold, distant oceans. It was said – most likely – that Philleas himself, or what was left of him, had clung to the document in a near-desperate fashion. It seemed that Philleas’ dying wish had been to preserve the parchment in his final moments.
Other items from the shipwreck passed into unknown hands, more avaricious than those of Arnould’s great-grandfather, who had aided in the salvaging of the wreck. The writings, were deemed of little worth – cast off as the nonsensical ramblings of a seaman mad by the vastness of the far oceans. And so it was that the document came to rest in the hands of the Adelaide family.

The manuscript, though sparse in words, recounted the alleged experiences of the mariner Philleas Lambert – a sailor who claimed to have glimpsed a city of unearthly beauty and untold riches.

A city, he wrote, that appeared on no map, whose name no human tongue could adequately pronounce. Its inhabitants lacked for nothing, save the burdens of earthly sorrows and poverty. It was a realm of towering spires that rose into the heavens, untouched by storms, its streets unsullied by waste and filled instead with prosperity. The children of this place played beneath a sun that not only rose in the east but set gloriously in the west, as though the day itself contained inexhaustible marvels.

Most curious of all was the material from which the city’s structures were formed. They appeared to rise from a substance akin to marble – flawless and resplendent – a material that, by some unknown artifice, shone with equal brilliance by day and by night. Its hues and textures lay beyond Philleas’ capacity to describe, defying even the most vivid imagination.

Philleas recorded his memories of this wondrous place with near-ecstatic fervour, hinting at untold adventures and unseen figures, though he never named particulars. Of its location, there was no mention, nor any account of how he had come upon it. The only clue lay in a cryptic passage in which he described it as lying “farther than the waters of this world reach, and yet close enough for any man to touch.”

The record bore neither beginning nor end, seeming instead like the capture of a single, unending moment – suspended within the bounds of his mortal span.

Why Arnould’s great-grandfather – and now Arnould himself – took such interest in these writings remained unclear to most. Arnould did not deny their fantastical nature; Philleas Lambert’s account offered no evidence to secure belief.

Yet something within it resisted dismissal. It stirred his thoughts – at times even his memory – as though the mind strained toward something it had once known but could no longer name. He was certain he had never seen such a place. And still, his thoughts inclined toward it, drawn by a truth that would not fully reveal itself.

It left him divided between unease and fascination.

“This must be how it feels,” he would sometimes think, “to stand at the edge of madness.” And yet, to Arnould, the sensation felt less like madness than release.
Arnould had never met his great-grandfather, though he was said to have been a solitary figure – a man who spent most of his days gathering and reading documents of an unusual and esoteric nature. Nearly all the books and manuscripts in the attic had been collected by this ancestor. Arnould sometimes found himself wishing he might have known him, suspecting they were not unlike in temperament.

It was Arnould’s grandmother – the great-grandfather’s daughter – who alone visited him in the attic, regarding him not with disgust but with a kindness rarely extended elsewhere. Few others were known to offer him even a smile. She, and an old fishmonger from the town market, were perhaps his only companions. Not that he frequented the market often – his affliction seldom allowed him beyond the confines of the house.

Here was a young man, still in his late twenties, who had never traveled farther than the edge of his town – his only company two elderly women, bound by the quiet nearness of their own mortality.

The thought of this narrow existence returned to him often, and he sought distraction in the old books and forgotten records, wondering how much longer he would remain tethered to the world of earth and sea.

Sleep was always a rare thing for Arnould to come by. For his weak body to reject it as well was merely another peculiarity of his unknown condition. Beyond his immersion in old writings, he often found himself gazing at the moon. He would imagine what it might be to reach for it – to grasp it, and perhaps to go beyond.
With a body bound more firmly to the earth than was common, the ambitions of his mind lacked nothing and often strayed further than most men found comfortable. Arnould did not fear losing his mind among the stars; it was his only measure of freedom.

Venturing only in mind, Arnould sat each night at the round attic window, enveloped in the moonlight of a mild summer sky. A gentle wind meandered through the open frame and along the old wooden pillars, carrying with it an inconspicuous melody. It felt familiar – almost demanding – and yet Arnould was certain he had never heard it before. With careful attention he tried to discern the direction from which it came, only to conclude that it surrounded him entirely. It was impossible to trace its origin.
He considered, briefly, whether this was the beginning of madness. It did not concern him long.
At some point he could no longer tell whether he was listening to a melody or sinking into a current of thoughts and whispers not his own. There was helplessness in it, but no discomfort – only a suspension, as though weight had briefly relinquished its claim. He felt no frailty in his bones, nor in his mind. If anything, Arnould felt more at ease than he ever had before.

As the melody faded into silence and Arnould was drawn back into thought, he slowly opened his eyes. His gaze – glassy, yet steady – lifted toward the clear night sky. His mind still unsettled by what had passed, he lowered his head and looked about him. He stood upon a wide field of grass beneath the moon’s light.
Arnould had never ventured far from his attic, yet there he was, his hometown nowhere in sight, the sound of distant waves carrying through the night air. Strangely, his body felt unburdened. There was no pain in his bones, no ache in his joints. Only the wind from the sea reaching inland, moving through his hair and across his hands.

A figure stood before him. The woman’s dress moved with the wind, slow and without urgency. Her hair fell dark – darker than the night behind her – her skin pale as lilies. He lifted his gaze to meet her eyes. They were clear, almost unnaturally so, fixed upon him without weight. Though they rested on him, he felt no gaze.
He could see her. He could not sense anyone within.

For a moment, he regarded her in silence. The question formed, but did not reach his lips. A faint curve touched her mouth – not gentle, not cruel – merely certain.
When she spoke, the sound did not resemble language. It carried no familiar structure, no shape he could name. And yet, somewhere beneath thought, he understood.

In a motion akin to the wind itself, she raised her hand and extended it toward Arnould. He did not question it. His thoughts had grown light in her presence, and that seemed reason enough. He reached for her hand without knowing why. Her touch was cold – not cruelly so, but without warmth – and faintly familiar. The moment their hands met, the world shifted. Whether it spun or simply withdrew, Arnould could not tell. The field behind them dissolved without resistance. In its place unfolded a landscape of unsettling beauty. Fields of flowers unknown to him stretched beneath a rising sun. Light gathered along his hair and hands. Dragonflies traced the air. Birds sang without interruption. Not a single cloud marked the summer sky.

Arnould’s mind drifted without aim, uncertain where it might come to rest. Yet beneath the lightness, a faint sense of futility stirred, as though direction itself had grown irrelevant. The warm breeze moved across his face, and sunlight gathered over the landscape in a muted gold. He blinked against the brightness, yet could not withdraw his gaze. His vision, blurred by moisture in his eyes, extended across fields of deep green, where nature thrived in a harmony almost too complete. Beyond the distant hills, the faint outline of a city emerged – remote, pale, and otherworldly. Towering spires of white stone rose into the sky, not piercing it, but seeming to belong to it.

The woman moved ahead of him without haste. Her dress and dark hair followed the wind without resistance. There was no effort in her stride. He could not name what compelled him, only that he followed – drawn toward the pale city that waited beyond the hills.

The woman turned. Her hair moved across her face in the wind, and through that shifting darkness her eyes settled upon Arnould. Her eyes were clear – perfectly so – but they did not reflect light. They did not hold depth in the way living eyes do. They did not search, nor focus, nor soften. They simply regarded him.
And within that regard there was no end.
He felt no hatred in them. No cruelty. No intention at all.

Only an absence so complete that it trembled against the edges of his being – not emptiness, but termination. Not darkness, but the certainty of its arrival.

Arnould fell to his knees. The weight returned without announcement, settling into bone and breath alike. His lungs tightened. His hand rose – unsteady – reaching toward her, though the distance between them no longer felt measurable. Before him, the pale towers shone, impossibly high and impossibly far.
Her gaze did not intensify. It did not need to. It occupied him entirely.
“Take me,” he managed, the words thin against the air. “There.”
The warmth withdrew. The cold did not rush in. It simply remained.

The morning breeze, cool and bracing, carried with it the briny tang of the sea, mingled with an intangible sense of melancholy that seemed to hover over the small coastal town. The scent of salt filled the air, seeping into every corner, as though the ocean sought to claim the very land itself. In the town's modest market square, life stirred with sluggish regularity, the familiar faces of the townsfolk moving in a slow, ritualistic rhythm that had changed little over the years.

An old crone, her back bowed by decades, heaved another batch of fish onto her stand, her hands unsteady as they grasped the scaly catch. The fishermen’s bounty had been plentiful that night, though she took little comfort in it. Each morning had become a procession of labor and repetition.
Pausing to catch her breath, she straightened as far as her bones allowed, her gaze moving across the market square. It was a small town, faces seldom changed; strangers were rare and noticed. She knew each villager by name, by habit, by the quiet marks time had left upon them.
And yet, today something stood apart.
Her gaze settled on a figure across the square – a young man, tall, speaking in low tones with a fruit vendor. His garments were finer than most worn there, and even at a distance there was something measured about him – too composed, too complete.
The crone narrowed her watery eyes. Could it be him?

She blinked, her thoughts struggling to align. It was not possible. He had been frail, pale, diminished, folded inward by illness. Yet the man before her stood upright, composed, whole. She knew every face in this town. This one she knew – and did not.
As she stared, sunlight caught along his figure, not on metal, not on ornament, but on something too clean, too exact. The reflection struck her eyes sharply. She blinked again.
In that brief interruption, a cold recognition passed through her.

When her sight cleared, her heart faltered. The young man had turned. His gaze rested on her. There was no smile. No effort to reassure. Only recognition. It was Arnould – of that she was now certain. His face bore no trace of the illness she remembered. And his eyes, once dulled by frailty, were steady now – too steady. They did not brighten. They did not search. They simply regarded her, as though measuring something she could not see.

For a moment, she felt as though the world around her had shifted, as though reality itself had thinned, and something else, something unspeakable, pressed faintly against it. The sea breeze, once warm, turned bitter, moving around her legs like cold current. Her limbs grew heavy, rooted to the ground as though the earth itself remembered its hold.

Her breath shortened. She tried to step back, but the effort did not reach her limbs. Arnould – if the name still applied – regarded her. His eyes were not dark, nor bright. They were simply without depth. They did not threaten. They did not accuse. They did not reflect her fear.
They held her as one might hold a place in memory – already concluded.

“Take me there.”