“ You pass through a woodland with a floor that seems remarkably clean of debris. Suddenly your attention is drawn to a twisted bit of wood by the trail side, a short broken twig with several stubs of branches along its length and most of the bark missing. When you reach it, the twig blurs and turns into a small brown lizard, caught in the middle of its body-twisting run. The little reptile darts away down the trail with impossible speed, no doubt magically enhanced, and is lost to sight in a moment. Now someone knows you are coming...”
“ The city of Nausopol is built on stilts. Lots of very sturdy stilts and butresses, of course, because it rises about five hundred feet from the ocean. Even the most terrific of storms is only heard in the city as a distant cacophony of blasts as waves strike the solid stonework fathoms below. It has never been attacked because of its isolation and impregnability.
It's not a place for the faint-hearted: vertigo and sea-sickness are not desirable traits. But when you are standing in the middle of the city there is no way you could tell that you were standing above an ocean, separated only by a gulf of air and a few stones.
A thousand steps lead down from Nausopol to the floating docks. These docks are pitch-coated wooden and can be raised by winches during squalls. Trade with other cities and countries is good: Nausopol is built over a sunken atoll whose minerals are still mined by divers, and it was from this that it originally derived its wealth.
But the principal method of getting to and from the city is by riding the giant sea-eagles which have been captured and bred for that very reason.”
“ AutoMedon A mechanical poet of renown not for his vast catalog of poetry, but for his complete lack of anything written or spoken, having had no output in his programmed profession. His creator is unknown or at least unaccredited, and there are those in great number in the artistic world who wonder and marvel at his inability to produce poetry, crediting that flaw to his creator who is unknown or at least un-credited. There is also a small faction of scholars who believe that when he finally, finally speaks, it will be the most beautiful or sorrowful verse ever spoke or will ever be spoken. Whether his creator is among either group or dead is unknown. AutoMedon sits alone under a tin roofed enclosure, upon a stone chair, with his gaze off in the distant as if thinking.
'It's strange to look at this mechanical man and think what thoughts are working through its' workings or even if the damn thing is' Aralis of Qurim, poet and pottery salesman”