Mist and Mirrors

In Kalishandra, the city of lost travellers, the city in the abyss, darkness has form. In the mist that rises periodically from cracks between the cobblestones, it has life. Melt-mist, the shaper, drifts along empty streets, welling into deep, choking pools in forgotten courtyards. It breaks in ephemeral smoke waves upon the stark stone walls of towers, which protrude above its curling tendrils like strangely envisioned nightmares. These bleak, inhospitable eyries are the lairs of dark and terrible wizards, beneath whose hard and stony glare Kalishandra shifts. Streets change. Walls stand where before there was but empty space. Courtyards once remembered fade into obscurity. Old things disappear, are misplaced; here a statue, there an ornamental fish pond. Even older things return. The smell of a river long thought lost - blood upon the cobbles. It continues. . .