The Shining City did not at first glance seem to be large; when
one first looked at its image one saw a mile-wide city of six- and ten-story
buildings of a variety of architectural styles. But the more one looked
the one more saw, and the larger the image that unfolded to the eye. Looking
at a street would bring to the eye a long broadway that seemed to span
for hundreds of miles, through the city and into the countryside and up
through mountains and then under the sea and then back into the city again;
looking at one of the (seemingly modest) sky-scrapers would reveal a massive,
Babel-sized edifice that went up for miles and below the ground for still
more miles. An alleyway would twist and turn and become a homey tunnel
and then a twisting and turning pathway through incredible caverns. A park
would become a jungle and then swards of well-trimmed grass and then a
veldt. A puddle would be revealed to be a bottomless lake. And all of this
was contained within the seemingly circumscribed limits of the Shining
City. What the mages and the gods and those of higher dimensions on the
plain of the M'krann knew was that the Shining City, which might or might
not be Heaven itself, was all things to all beings, and that whatever one
most desired, be it the awesome solitude of a mountain peak or the joyful
crowded life of a packed city square, could be found within the Shining
City. If it was not Heaven itself, it was literally the next best thing.
And Apocalypse was destroying it. He was now transformed into a massive
ball of blackness, flares of hate and evil streaming off behind him, his
face on the front of the ball. He roared through the streets and alleys
and byways and paths of the Shining City, disintegrating and exploding
everything in his path, pulling down and pushing over buildings and collapsing
caverns and tunnels and tearing up mountains and evaporating rivers and
seas. He did this not because he found God or souls, but for the sheer
joy of destruction and the glory of asserting his power.
Darkening his mood, however, was the absence of God and the angels and
the blessed souls they guarded. The Shining City, in fact, was empty of
all life; even the pastoral scenes were absent of animal life. Too, Apocalypse
began noticing that parts of the City were reforming themselves when his
attention was turned away from them. When he concentrated he could raze
whole swathes of the City down to its bedrock and beyond; but the rest
of the City would build itself back up again. And Apocalypse could not
seem to make it stop....
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