How the Imaskari created Sigil

With our empire so vast, stretching across so many worlds, it became clear that our old capital would no longer suffice. We needed some place more… centralized; some place designed to handle traffic from any number of planes; some place free from any possible influence of the meddlesome Powers.

It was obvious that only one site would do. In the Center of the Center of the Multiversal Tree the Axis Mundi stood, the indestructible trunk upon which the Tree hung. Even the Powers were helpless before it. No magic could exist there.

Yet the Imaskari, with all our power, would find a way to build in that place, in the nothingness above the Axis where matter, energy, space, time, even thought itself become the most absolute void.

A soft place was found, a place where power could be brought to a place that could have no power, a paradox at the absolute center of the center of the center.

The brilliant engineer Rathecine, assisted by the entirety of the academy of spatio-temporal-planar engineering, constructed the outer shell, a massive shining ring of spellstrengthened marble. Gravity was bound to its inner edge by the evoker Lyrrish. The workings were complex, far beyond any that had ever been attempted, but Rathecine worked like a woman inspired, even possessed by Forces far beyond anyone’s comprehension, even that of the petty Powers who claim so many things of their wisdom and might. Yet the genius was purely of mortal origin, wasn’t it?

Now, after all that has happened, I wonder. What was it about this place in the Center of All that contaminated the plans of our best and brightest, the inheritors of the sum total of the knowledge of our race? Were the plans ever truly theirs? They were shielded from interference by the Powers, and the Powers would never have created a place that they themselves were forbidden from entering - then what could it have been?

Was our empire ever anything but a means to an end?

The architecture of our new capital had been meticulously planned, intended as it was to mimic the sigils representing all the planes of the multiverse as well as the cycle of the Zodiac, unifying the cosmology as if all the planes fit into the same great hypothetical Wheel. Many portals to the planes the sigils represented were opened along the length of each structure in order to ease the flow of traffic onto our capital’s broad streets. The city below - the sewers, aqueducts, storage, and maintenance tunnels - perfectly reflected the shapes found in the city above, its own portals providing the capital with air, water, and waste disposal. The design was astoundingly complex, yet it all fit together in an eye-pleasing way that was ultimately very logical and easy to navigate.

Because of its design, because of the greater design that it formed and its essential role completing the design of our empire itself, we called it Sigil. We were very proud of it.

When the buildings were first set in place, everything seemed as we had imagined it, our blueprints and conceptual drawings brought to life, heart-wrenchingly beautiful in marble and precious metals.

Then we started getting lost.

Not just turned around, not just confused by a place we weren’t yet used to. The very people who had designed the city began discovering dead ends and cul-de-sacs where there shouldn’t have been any, places that weren‘t on any of their maps. They discovered entire buildings - entire streets full of buildings, extending much further than should have been possible, further than where Sigil’s boundaries should have been, extending further than we could explore deep into an urban hinterland that couldn’t possibly exist. The size of the city’s marble shell hadn’t changed, but the size of the area inside it seemed to have grown geometrically.

From the air, the city’s sigils were no longer perfect and still. Though this wasn’t detectable from the ground, they writhed as if they had a life of their own.

At that time, the new places weren’t populated. At least, not as far as we knew. The city still belonged solely to Imaskar. The paths the city described was wrong, but the basic design was still ours. We blamed the confusion on our own people, and we didn’t yet worry that we might have built something we couldn’t control. This was an unexpected feature, but not necessarily a bad one. We could easily turn all the new space to our advantage, once we had built facilities to service it. We didn’t yet worry that our new capital might be our doom.

Then we began to notice anomalies in the portals even in the city’s deliberate sections. The doors were leading places they shouldn’t have led, sometimes places we, in all our empire’s exploration and colonization, didn’t know existed. Places that couldn’t exist, not according to everything we thought we knew about the cosmology of the multiverse - places that were widdershins or upside down compared to the planes we knew, where the very stars and celestial orbs were wrong. Those of us who lived in our new capital began to find it difficult to communicate with the rest of our empire, or even to find it. Water and air continued to flow in and out of the capital, but we know longer knew the source of these things, or their destination. Other things began to arrive with them, substances that weren’t water or air or anything we could identify.

This development heralded the beginnings of the first mass panic. The city had been meant to allow all parts of our great empire to easily communicate with every other part, but now it seemed to do the opposite, to separate us, to banish us to this strange place we no longer were sure we could trust. Instead of a city of doors, it began to seem like a cage.

The archbuilders put down the riots ruthlessly. They repaired the portals’ dweomers and their functionality was restored, and along with it, peace.

Foolishly, we let ourselves relax.

Then came the Strangers. Cloaked, cowled figures who might - or might not - have been humanoid. They were simply there one morning, everywhere, drifting not walking along the streets and entering and leaving the strange, alien buildings that had sprung up alongside our own. They never spoke, and nothing we could do would even cause them to notice us. The temperature of Sigil dropped from the balmy summer we had designed to a cool autumn. The chills we felt from that were much more than physical. There were rumors of one Stranger, larger and more fearsome than the others, its body studded with terrible blades.

We panicked again, and again the riots were ruthlessly put down. The Strangers weren’t real, the archbuilders assured us. They were a mass hallucination, and once we adjusted to the exotic climate of our creation they would fade away.

Yet the absurdly tall, spiky buildings that were their homes were solid and real. We could enter them and observe the spectral Strangers going about their daily lives. Worse, they were old, pitted and stained and repaired as if they had been around for centuries, or longer.

The chill we felt when we met the Strangers was nothing compared to how we felt when we began meeting ourselves. Ourselves and our family, our friends, our imperial troops and everyone we knew, only decades older, moving and speaking backwards. As it was with the Strangers, we couldn’t touch them or communicate with them in any way, although we could enter their homes, so much like our homes but more lived-in, more used. It was as if some time in the near future we had stopped moving forward in time and started moving backwards, passing through ourselves on our way to the unfathomable past.

Then other versions of ourselves began passing through us, younger versions, older versions, versions of reversed gender and temperment. We felt like Sigil had become a cloud drifting through many other clouds, changing size and shape, breaking apart and reconfiguring as it flew… but what strange sky had we found ourselves in? What winds buffeted us according to their unknowable whims?

The authorities ordered us not to panic. We were not allowed to use the portals to leave, though traffic from elsewhere had slowed to a trickle. The best mages were working on it, we were told. Normality would soon be restored.

The Bugs told us differently. The tall chitinous humanoids, looking vaguely like graceful, serene mantises in expensive silken robes glittering with jewels. Their homes were also jeweled, and as we watched they had their pets make jewels of our homes as well. Calmly, beatifically, they told us many things about the history and lore of the unthinkably ancient city in which they lived, the city we had only thought was our own. Our imperial troops would have dealt with them, slaughtered them all in a desperate attempt at enforcing the status quo that had never really existed except in the imaginations of our authority figures. Their mad dreams… but the troops were gone, the archbuilders helpless, barricading themselves within their palaces protected by as many wards as they could muster. They no longer spoke to us, no longer ordered us to do anything, yet the Bugs were an uncannily calming presence. We didn’t know why we trusted them, but we did.

The Bugs taught us about this Sigil we no longer knew, about its five wards and about the unfamiliar planes beyond the city’s doors. They taught us about the dabus, the living puzzles who maintained the City of Doors that strangely enough the Bugs called Sigil too. They warned us about the city’s mysterious guardian, for whom they had no name.

It became more and more common for new species, societies, and sects to appear, teaching us many new ways to cope with the changes, none of them agreeing with any other. One group insisted that our experiences were proof of the supremacy of Chaos, another insisted that they were proof of an undeniable Law. One group asked us, their voices pregnant with emotion and madness, how we could still doubt that there was no meaning anywhere. Another told us calmly and severely that our experience had proven we were ghosts, that we had always been ghosts, and this was the afterlife.

Imaskari saw less and less of each other as we found new places for ourselves in our new cosmopolitan existence. We rarely saw the Strangers or the Bugs, though both of their building styles now seemed to dominate Sigil. A city of blades and jewels, we called it.

The archbuilders made one last attempt to regain control. Legion upon legion moved in through the few portals that still worked the way they had been intended, an army of spell weavers, ur-priests, infantry and cavalry that had never been equaled drawn from every corner of the Empire. Magics were worked that twisted space and reality, awful spells that killed those who spoke them intended to bind the city to the soul of the Imaskari Empire until the end of time. Tens of thousands were killed, Imaskari and non-Imaskari alike. And finally She appeared.

She seemed like a beautiful woman, though my Bug companion insisted she looked like a Bug. Swords and knives grew from her flesh, surrounding her head like a crown, like the rays of the sun we could no longer quite remember. She gazed into our souls with her imperious eyes, her bright robes not even rippling, even in the middle of the Imaskari mage-storm. The spells and arrows thrown at her she utterly ignored. Her shadow darted like a snake, felling vast swathes of the army as if they were stalks of corn. When terrified battalions tried to prostrate before her and worship her - something normally unthinkable to the Imaskari, who would never kowtow to the Powers, not even in the face of death - she killed them too. With their riddlesome glyphs, attendant dabus told us that the Lady was never to be worshipped.

Finally the battle was over. There were no warriors or spellcasters left to fight. To the rest of us, exhausted and covered in blood, Imaskari and non-Imaskari alike, the Lady merely glared at, her lovely, perfect face utterly calm and serene. The dabus spoke for her, in their perverse language of sigils, directly to the archbuilders who some force kept hovering in a circle around their conqueror - probably, from the way they thrashed and choked, by their throats - THE CITY NO LONGER TOLERATES YOUR FACTION. ABANDON IT OR DIE.

The archbuilders were dropped to the street. The Lady and her strange handmaidens drifted away, and were soon gone from our sight.

The city has now been rebuilt, both by its citizens and by the ubiquitous dabus who construct tall spiky structures not intended for beings of human scale, or for those who need stairs. Still, Sigil’s industrious inhabitants adapt them and soon dwell in them as happily as any other. They hardly seem to realize how bizarre everything is.

I haven’t seen another Imaskari in a long time. The others have fled, or simply become lost among the city’s confounding and illogical twists and turns, never to find their ways back to their homes again, or they have blended with the greater population, adopted truly Sigilian customs and dress, and are indistinguishable from any other Cagers. I think I may be the last faithful son of our Empire remaining. Just one, left as a witness, or a warning.

The last time I saw one of my fellow countrymen, I was given a horrified tale of a plague radiating from all portals, a deadly contagion against which the spells of our ur-priests could not avail. Imaskar itself was dying, or so I was told. I could not go back to help or even to see if the tale was true or merely the ravings of a plane-struck madman. I can no longer find a portal leading to any place our empire had ever known.

Perhaps I am the last Imaskari living anywhere, the rest of them destroyed for our nation’s hubris, our absurd confidence in the face of cosmic mystery we couldn’t begin to really understand. Utterly alone in a city of millions, I mourned the magical and artistic brilliance of our lost culture until I was completely out of tears.