lazybox | [voicetest] it's this guy

Oh, it was. I could only bring so much of its magnificence to life here - my energy is hardly infinite.

[Also, presumably the real Amaurot was beneath the sky, not the sea.

The fact that the stranger is paying the city itself the proper reverence, however, makes its Architect relax, just a bit. If some intruder must see his heart, at least it is someone who respects it.]

Gone more ages than any mortal could comprehend, of course. But so long as even one of us remains, then so does the dream that it might return.

[He's known grand cities beneath the sea, although even the greatest wonders Atlantica has to offer pale in comparison to this. Still, it would be a shame for something like this to be tucked away under the sea the way it is, and if the recreation is accurate - and he has to believe it is - the inhabitants look awfully content to simply walk along the streets, for somewhere that might have been an underwater city to begin with.]

'Long ago, when the world was still new,' hunh?

[There's a distinct sense he's quoting something, with that first bit. Not unkindly, nor ungently, but it has the sound of some fragment of an old story. Something he knows by heart. Perhaps even something that would be almost universally familiar, back wherever he's from, wherever that should happen to be.]

Memory's a powerful thing, though. And as long as that lasts... there's still at least that much left behind, even if it's not always the same.

[To a careful - and sharp-eared - listener, it might just sound like there's a personal sort of familiarity there. Something that flickers into life and then is gone a moment later; something he can't entirely hide, with the conversation taking the turns it is, but also something that he's not used to mentioning even so much as obliquely.]

[The quotation gets something of an amused look, still tinted with melancholy.]

Before that, actually. 'When the world was new' is a time written on top of our ruins.

[From where he came from or not, it seems it is universal enough to strike a familiar chord.]

Powerful as memory is, it is but a pale reflection with only one keeper. The true power of such a thing has always come from being shared, no?

[Perhaps not the intended audience, but this is still a show for someone, not merely his own revisitings of those lost times. Even for him, those have lost details to the washing away of time, leaving only the vague shapes of the sand where once details were as sharp as day.]

It's an imperfect translation.

[Even in his own reality, the difference between the kind of world that people live on and the kind that encompasses all of what there is, worlds included gets a little muddy from time to time.]

Universe might be the better definition. It's just that no one back home really uses it.

{Still, every world, every universe, every reality has to start somewhere. Even if it's on the bones of some othere civilization, and that is absolutely something he knows all to well. Daybreak Town is long gone, and though Scala ad Caelum had never been his home in the same way, it, too, has faded into the darkness. Vanished, save in the memory of a precious few people. Fewer even, now that the old coot has finally gone to his just rewards.]

But you're right. It's hard being the only person keeping that kind of memory alive. Hurts too, sometimes, when you aren't expecting it, or when something jostles those memories into being more awake than you want them to be.

[It's not anything cruel or malicious in his voice. Rather it's understanding and - rare though it is for him - sympathy. It's not often he's had a chance to speak about this sort of thing, and rarer still that he finds someone who might actually understand, besides.]

[voicetest] it's this guy

no subject

/wanders in several months later with starbucks

pft you're cool

/tosses up a KH3 spoiler warning for like. the rest of this thread, most likely