The City

“I have, in a sense, come to the only place I can call home...

“I have visited the City and the Tower again. I had been the General’s bride, and he the new Emperor of North and South and Atlantis-across-the-Ocean. The City had been any city to a conqueror, sheeted in flags, misted in wine. I had not recognized it, this third bitter time, but this is the City I was born in.

“This is the dictatorship ruled by my Mother, where the High Priest is the man who fathered me, who fathered my brother and lover on the witch Ooldra, and must surely kill me, the living proof of his betrayal of his vows of lifelong celibacy.”