Nonspace and the City Glyph

Teller of Fate

Intermezzo: Nonspace and the City Glyph

* * *

Through the cracks, inside the walls, above the ceilings, under the cellars, between the old layers of paint, plaster and wallpaper of Space is Nonspace. It is the aboriginal home of Space, nearly empty since before the birth of the Aions. It is a nothing, anti-space, a leftover.

It serves a critical purpose. It keeps separate, incompatible sub-Realities. These float, spheres of many colours, kept from merging by a force none can measure.

A city exists in Nonspace, riddled with doors to many worlds. The keys to those doors are puzzles. Theses Portals are everywhere: hidden in blind alleys, in forgotten cellars, under ancient stone stairways, through bricked up doors, windows looking into forgotten rooms, and along disused lonely corridors of the Nonspace City, the Impossible City, the City Without a World, the City that is a World, the City Glyph.

A square pillar of something resembling rock—the Spire—juts out through Nonspace. Glyph covers its only end. High at the corners, dipping somewhat along the edges and sloping into a shallow bowl in the center, it rather resembles the top of a molar. It covers an area of over one hundred square miles and Glyph forests it with structures in a dissociative profusion of styles. The streets wind like a lunatic’s emotional state.

Order does exist here, though. Four nearly identical citadels grip the corners of the tooth, dominating the city. They are the homes of the four Guilds: The Merchants, the Mages, the Mercenaries, and the Magsmen (Glyph owns no gods). High stone walls girdle the city’s perimeter, following its undulations and joining the keeps to each other.

The Gates, four permanently open Portals, exactly between each guild building, interrupt the walls. One would expect them to lead to never ending falls (and so they would appear from the outside), but from the inside they are the largest, indeed, the only visible Portals in the city. They lead to the worlds of Porta, Effor, Inclino, and Consilium.

Four rivers there are, providing Glyph with its water and its air: the Acheron, the Cocytus, the Phlegethon, and the Lethe. They flow from under the guild keeps, burying themselves again under the city’s center.

The final visible signs of order are the Street and the Avenue, informal names for the broad roadways that run straight from gate to gate, cutting the city into equal quarters.

At the center sprawls a broad heptagon of eccentric shape, defining an open space called the Plaza of Dying Suns.

Jutting from the cobblestones in the middle is a squat plinth weighed down by a Blaxstone statue. No one knows what manner of thing it represents, not even whether it models a living thing or not. More peculiarly, no one can agree on its shape; indeed, the shape seems to change when observed at different times, though it never changes when looked at. At the base, facing the Effor Gate is a plaque with the inscription “Founded 29 D.M.” in the four most used languages in the city.

Atop a metal pole at the edge of the Plaza closest to Merchants Guild is a large, four-faced clock, the Orloj. It keeps the rhythm of the Thirty Aions, seconds to millennia, in Universal Time.

— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, August 2026

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Gideon is a freethinker, free expression absolutist, intersectionalist, and a proud child of the Enlightenment. He lives and works on the Pacific Coast.

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