There was something about the news that energised almost everyone in the world. The idea that this city, the one from multiple different myths across vast and unconnected cultures was not only real, but that it still existed, spoke to everyone in some way.
Of course, the skeptics rolled their eyes and asked for actual proof – none of which was forthcoming – and said it was a story until they could walk through the city gates. But even inside that group there were whispers of something. The seed of doubt was sown and it would, eventually, take root.
The conspiracy nuts were all over it, almost the polar opposite of the skeptics. They relished the chance to rearrange their disparate ideas into a single, larger, conspiracy that centered on this city and its hypothetical inhabitants. Were they the reptilians? Were they the ones that actually controlled the media-news-goverment? No one knew, which for them meant it was gospel truth. Their corner of the internet went wild. It was like winning every lottery all at once without even entering.
There was just one group who werent excited by the news. They werent widely known, so their dour acceptance of everything never made it to the news, or to the forums. They were the people who already knew of the citys actual existence. They were the ones who had been trying to locate it for centuries, descendants of the original citizens.
“Did we not say to them to keep this news quiet?” the barely contained anger of the man sent ripples through the crowd. “That revealing the status of the city was something to be avoided?”
“We did,” a calmer man said, sighing. They had all been over this so many times.
“Then how did it get out?”
“We are still looking into that, but our best evidence right now suggests this was a rogue researcher who was not familiar with our ways.”
The angry man snorted. Then calmed himself some. “Proposals?” he asked the room at large.
The room itself was about the size of half a football field, with a raised stage at the front and two podiums; one on the right where the angry man stood and the other on the left where the other was leaning, relaxed.
Beyond the stage were rows of pews. In them, scattered randomly, were a dozen or so audience members. Some looked as upset as the angry man, the rest as calm as the other. None of them were interrupting the two on stage. But now that the question had been posed, all of them immediately raised their arms.
“You,” the angry man said, pointing to someone who seemed to be as upset as he was.
“We go public,” the audience member said, getting a sigh of frustration from half the room. “We tell them what we know, how we know it and what we are planning to do about it. We make them realise that seeking the city, no matter who or why, is a bad idea and that it was lost for a good reason.”
“Terrible idea,” the calm man on stage said, as the audience member retook his seat. “Firstly, you said it yourself, the city was lost for a good reason. Anyone but us seeking them out is likely to come to a bad end, and the rest of those people out there, they dont learn from their mistakes. It would cause suffering which we are meant to prevent. Secondly, if the city was to be found by someone who isnt us, they could accidentally bring it back. Then what? More suffering. We cannot use what we know to confirm what is merely speculation.”
“Speculation?” the angry man on stage spat. “Their archaeologists confirmed it.”
“They have no physical evidence,” the calm man shrugged. “If nothing else happens in this area for a while, the news will disappear and people will forget. But I am nothing if not fair. Are there anymore proposals?”
A calm looking audience member raised his hand slowly, after no one else moved. “We re-prioritise our own efforts to locate the city,” he said, his voice was barely more than a whisper but in the hall they all sat in, it was loud enough to be heard everywhere. “They have shown that indirect evidence, in sufficient quantity, is enough to deduce things that even we have trouble showing despite knowing them to be true. If we ignore this, we risk being blindsided when they eventually show where the city is. We must find it, actually find it, first.”
“Re-prioritise?” the angry man on stage said thoughtfully. “In what ways?”
“We have been tracking the city’s movements since its inception, where it moves to, how and why. We know much of its history before its fall, but after that we lose it. It must have travelled somewhere after, but we dont have much to go on.”
“We have the battle site, something they dont have,” the calm man replied. “They wont be able to connect that to the city unless they go through the same processes we have spent more than three hundred years perfecting.”
“That is true,” the audience member said. “But, whether they know it or not, they have one of the latter positions of the city in their data. They could do what we have done, trace its locations – forward and back – and get to where we are in a much faster time.”
The two on stage exchanged a look.
“What do you suggest we do then?”
“I thought a two pronged challenge would work,” the audience member said. “We discredit the recent research; I know we have the ability and the desire to do that. Secondly, we,” he paused here and sighed, relaxing and then standing up straight as if preparing to have to defend himself. “We go to the battle site and search it top to bottom. We finally stop tiptoeing around it and work out, for sure, what happened all those eons ago.”
There is a place, on the north coast of what is now Africa, not far from a city that is now called Algiers, that no one goes to. To the natives, it is a place of great mourning. It is where the dead come and go from, an accessway to the afterlife. The living have no place there and so are not allowed. To the non-native locals, its simply haunted. Stories about why are many and contradictory. People shudder when tourists ask and no one ever goes there. For the tourists, those that are aware of it, its a bucket list item. Something to do before they die. Yet no one ever manages to get there. Those that claim to have seen it can never prove it and every single description they give is different.
In short, it is a place that seems to prevent anyone from seeing it. Whether by the stories told across the region or some actual magic, no one can say.
In truth, it is the site of a great battle. A singular, one off fight between forces unknown, although some people do know that one side was the city, or the army thereof.
If you were to stand there, on the site that prevents such a thing from happening, you would be standing on a mass grave. Thousands upon thousands of bodies are buried just below the surface, covered by many generations of dirt and rock. Nearby, if you dug a mere three feet down, you would find foundations. A large city used to stand right here. The battle was fought immediately outside its walls, hence its name right before the fall, The City of Death.
The two men who shared a stage only a few days earlier were now sharing a meal in a small cafe in a city they were both familiar with – Tunis. They had both lived here for many years in their youth although they were both born in North America – the angry man from Vancouver, Canada and the calm from Roswell, New Mexico.
Today, though, they could travel anywhere. They could live anywhere. Tunis was merely a short stop after a long flight. Soon they would drive to Algiers, and from there to a place sacred, even to them. They ate in silence, both thinking about the plan.
The first part, the discrediting, had gone well. Leaked documents that showed the archaeologists involved in the research paper had taken money from various groups with certain agendas that lined up with the idea of the city being real.
The skeptics were, of course, the first to jump on this. Claiming that it was always the way; vested interests always ruined real science. The city was a nice story, but it was just that – a story. It was never real and no one should think so.
It was the second part that worried the two men. They knew the actual researchers, not just the names and faces that had been put to the paper, would not stop their search. They would accept this setback and keep looking.
“Have you been there before?” the angry man, who was considerably less angry now, asked.
“No,” the calm man said. “Ive never made it past Algiers. The tests were too much.”
“How long has it been since you tried?”
“I was a young, idiotic child,” the calm man chuckled. “Barely out of my teens. I vowed to try again when I knew better.”
“And now, here you are, well past your peak and still not trying.”
“We’re old men, the two of us, the job is not ours to accomplish. All we can do is help the young ones keep our traditions alive.”
“Then why are we here?” there was something coy in the angry mans voice.
The calm man smiled. “Do you think I want to die without seeing the final place the city stood before it fell? Where my ancestors lived and died to save the world?”
The angry man nodded and sighed. “Its a shame they failed,” he said.
“No,” the calm man said. “They didnt fail, theyre still out there, somewhere, trying. Its up to us to make sure they succeed.”