Cities: Caracola

Citizens of Caracola, the peregrine city, know only two wants: proximity to kin and the first light of morning.

Gilded quarters sprout on the orient rim. Families migrate towards the rising sun; behind them, houses fetch little more than a cart and a limping mule. Their creeping leaves a wake of pale ruin — derelict towers, frescoed chapels, train stations, graves. Children are shooed away from this netherworld, where ghosts and outlaws disappear, where vultures nest.

The sun travels, dawn to dusk, over the city spine: an ancient road running across from the gilded quarters through the netherworld, into the night, into the past. Far away, desert dunes swallow it.

Caracola has bridged rivers of caimans, braved jungles of jaguars and army ants. It spent a decade crawling beneath waiting condors down the face of a precipice. But now it nears the sea.

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