Chapter Text
The lake water is still, and dark. Sometimes the light will strike it just right, and it will become mirror-clear, clear as air, clear as a mountain spring, and in its depths the city still stands, its roofs gilded, its streets filled with people, but if you dive in, ripples will dissolve the image, and there will be nothing but weeds and reeds, thick clutching roots in the mud, and cold, darting fishes, and your choice of drowning or returning to land, bedraggled and sodden, with nothing to show for your foolishness, and the city vanished away as though it never had been.
No, that is not how you enter such cities. Ignore the light: if you see them, you cannot touch them. Wait till the water is dark, wait until you have nothing to guide you but faith, and then dive, swimming further than you should, as far as your last breath will take you, too far to turn back and make the surface on that one breath.
Of course, you may not reach it even then.
But all things become familiar with habit: there is no wonder too great, no sight too splendid or too terrifying, that it cannot be ignored, be taken for granted, by those who see it every day, hurrying past to breakfast, or skirting it on the way to work. So it is with such cities, lost beneath the water, drowned, somewhere between holy and damned, but still cities, and as such - well, a market is a market even if you have to half-drown yourself to reach it. Just as pearl divers think nothing of the depths to which they dive, or those who live on mountains do not remark on the thinness of the air, so it is natural for those who live by a lake to go at times to the nearest city, even if that city is not quite where it once was, and the means of ingress is a little unusual.
And you, too, o traveller - what is one more city? Is it truly so different from towns hanging from a cliffside, cities burrowed underground, villages in treetops?