Prelude: Red

These are the same shoes, worn and tired, treading land tread by ghost skinned people, in trepidation, in fear, in the excitement of exploration, of conquering, of creating an entirely new world... these are the same shoes I've had for years. They are ripped, torn at the seams, bruised on the heels, disrepaired and overutilized. I sink into the moment, away from my old life, and I breathe in somebody else's air. I am a foreigner here, a transplant in a kingdom one and half steps removed from the porch I used to sit on every night. There was, in my head, a compactness that didn't really exist. There were old billboards scrawled with the messages of a hundred years gone by and delivery doors nestled into every ancient apartment. I expected a sort of ruination, the kind of crumbling that comes from time sweeping its way through your wet stone alleys and steaming manhole curbsides. I drift through it, half aware of the modernity, the absolute futurism of glass and marble and concrete shoving adamantly upward, raking the sky with the sounds of money changing hands, of science exploding our notions of what is magical and what is fantastic, of fortune and fate and all of the beautiful things that a man or a woman can make with their hands. There is noise in every corner, there are people underground and above in rockets and golden zeppelins and out in the sea in every sort of vessel you can imagine. Markets thrive and sinister things await around precipitous corners. I drink in everything with magnolia eyes, wide and flowered and just south of total amazement. I will wake in this place for three months, and I will remain untethered, floating out amongst the crowds of nationals, the throngs of diaspora scattered revenants, clinging to their backgrounds for some sense of identity in boiling pot of homogenization. I walked these streets a million years ago, with demons and bugbears at my side and I walked them when I was just a toddler, even then aware of the dead things that find their way up from death's head grinning graves into the fabric of the colony.
It welcomes me with open arms.
And who am I, then, to reject it?