Far below us, a broad valley opened out between great walls of white-capped mountains. And in its center, built on either side of an ice-blue river, rose a city more marvelous than I had ever dreamed. It filled most of the valley. Although not as large as Tria, it had a splendor that even the Trians might have envied. Many great towers and spires, made of glittering sweeps of living stone, seemed to grow out of the valley's very rock. Some of these were half a mile high and nearly vanished into the sky. Their building stones were of carnelian and violet, azure and aquamarine and a thousand other soft shifting hues. The city's broad avenues and streets were laid out with precision from east to west and north to south as if to mark the four points of the world. The late afternoon sun poured dawn these thoroughfares like rivers of gold. The various palaces and temples caught up its light. But the magnificence of the buildings, I thought was not in their number nor even their size. Rather, it was their perfect proportions and sparkle that caught the eye and stirred the soul. The houses along even the side streets seemed to cast their colors at each other and reflect those of their neighbors. Their lovely lines and arrangement bespoke an almost seamless blending with the earth – and with each other. It was as if the whole city was a choir of sight, intoning deep and startling harmonies, giving the song of its beauty to the wind and the sky, to the moon and the sun and the stars.
Above the city, on the slope of a mountain to the east huge and fantastic sculptures gleamed. A few of these were diamond-like figures a mile high; near them, immense but delicate-looking crystals opened beneath the sun like glittering flowers. It seemed like something that only the Galadin themselves could have created. Ymiru saw me staring at it and told me that the Ymanir called this great work the Garden of the Gods.
As striking as were these marvels, they paled beneath the greatest giory of this place.
This was a mountain to the west that overlooked the whole valley. Ymiru said it was the highest mountain in the world. Standing above the lesser peaks to either side, it rose straight into the sky in a great upward thrust of stone and ice. It had an almost perfect symmetry, like that of a pyramid. Although its pointed summit and upper reaches were crowned in pure, white snow, the main body of it appeared to be made of amethyst emerald, sapphire and jewels of every color. I could not imagine how it had come to be.
'That is Alumit,' Ymiru said as he watched me and my friends staring at it. 'We call it the Mountain of the Morning Star.'
This name, as he spoke it in his deep voice that rumbled like thunder, stunned me into silence.
'And your city?' Maram asked, standing next to his horse behind us.
'What do you call it?'
'Its name is Alundil,' Ymiru told us. 'This means the City at the Stars in the old language.'
As the wind whipped swirls of snow about our legs, I stared down at this fantastic place for quite a while. It was strange. I thought that all the legends and old wives' tales had told of the Ymanir as only savage and man- eating Frost Giants. And with their fearsome borkors and harsh laws, savage they might truly have been. But they had built the most beautiful creation on earth. And no one, it seemed, except my companions and I, and the Ymanir themselves, had ever beheld it.
Kane, gazing down into the valley as if its splendor had swept him away to another world, suddenly looked at Ymiru and said, 'All these years, walking among the other cities of the world, and other mountains – even without wearing a blindfold, I might as well have been.'
'I've never imagined seeing such a thing,' Maram added, blinking his eyes. He looked up at Ymiru and asked, 'Did your people make this? How could they have?'
How, indeed, I wondered, staring down at the great sculptures of the Garden of the Gods? How could naked giants with spiked clubs have built a greater glory than had even the ancient architects of Tria during the great golden Age of Law? How could anyone?
'Yes, we did – that is who we Ymanir are,' Ymiru said proudly. 'We are workers of living stone; we are mountain shapers and gardeners of the earth.'
He went on to say that the Ymanir's greatest delight was in making things out of things. They especially loved coaxing out of the earth the secret and beautiful forms hidden there. Ymiru told us that his people were devoted to discovering how to forge substances of all kinds, and none more so than the gelstei crystals.
'But the secret of their making has been lost to us for most of an age,' he said sadly.
'At least the making of the greater galastei.'
'In other lands,' Master Juwain told him, 'it has been forgotten how to forge even the lesser gelstei.'
'So much has been lost,' Ymiru said bitterly. 'And that is why the Urdahir, some of them, seek the secret of the ultimate making.'
'And what is that?' Maram asked, staring at the jeweled mountain called Alumit.
'Why, the making of the golden crystal of the Galastei itself,' Ymiru said. 'That is why we, too, seek the cup you call the Lightstone. We believe that only the Lightstone itself will ever reveal the secret of how it was created.'
With this secret, he told us, the Ymanir could not only reforge the great gelstei crystals of old and a new Lightstone, but the very world itself.
That was a strange thought to take with us on our descent to the city. We followed a well-marked track that cut through the pass's snowfields and wound down through the treeline of the mountain beneath us. It was nearly dark before we came out of the mouth of a narrow canyon onto Alundil's heights. Immediately upon setting foot in this enchanting city, with its graceful houses and stands of silver shih trees, I had a strange sense of simultaneously walking my horse down a quiet street and standing a thousand miles high. The sweep of the great spires seemed to draw my soul up toward the stars. In this marvelous place, I was still very much of the earth and on it, never more so – and yet I felt myself suddenly opened like a living crystal that is transparent to other worlds and other realms. Lovely was my home in the Morning Mountains, and magical were the woods of the Lokilani, got in no other place on Ea had I felt myself to be so great and noble a being as I did here.
We proceeded through the streets and onto one of the city's broad avenues, all of which were deserted, likewise, no fire or light brightened the windows of the houses and buildings that we passed. Maram, somewhat vexed at this strangeness, asked Ymiru if his people had once been more numerous. Had they, he asked, abandoned this part of the city for other districts?
'Yes, once the Ymanir were a much greater people,' he told us. His voice was heavy with a bitter sadness. 'Once, we claimed nearly all of the mountains as our home. But when the Great Beast took the Black Mountain, he sent a plague to kill the Ymanir.
The survivors were too few to hrold. He drove us off, into the westernmost part of our realm -into Elivagar. He and his Red Priests did dreadful things to our hrome.
And thus sacred Sakai became Asakai, the accursed land.'
He went on to tell us that even before Morjin's rise, there had never been enough of his people to fill a city so large as Alundil. And as large as it was, it would grow only larger, for the Ymanir continued to add to it stone by stone and tower by tower as they had for thousands of years,
'I don't understand,' Maram said, blowing out his breath into the cold, darkening air.
'If Alundil is already too big for your people, why build it bigger?'
'Because,' Ymiru said, 'Alundil is not for us.'
The clopping of the horses' hooves against the stone of the street suddenly seemed too loud. Ymiru, Havru and Askir – and the other Ymanir – suddenly stood as straight and proud as any of the sculptures in the Garden of the Gods.
The look on Maram's face suggested that he was now totally mystified, as were the rest of us. And so Ymiru explained, 'Long ago, our scryers looked toward the stars and beheld cities on other worlds. It is our greatest hope to recreate on earth these visions that they saw.'
'But why?' Maram asked.
'Because someday the Star People will come again,' Ymiru said. 'They will come to earth and find prepared for them a new hrome.'
It was upon hearing this sad history and sad dreams of the future that Ymiru and the others took us to meet with their Elders. As Ymiru had said, Alundil was not for the Ymainr and so his people had built their own town in the foothills east of the valley.
This consisted mostly of great, long, stone houses arrayed on winding streets. The Ymanir had applied only a little of their art in raising up these constructions. None were of the marvelous living stone that farmed the buildings of the dark city below.
