A Magic of Nightfall

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If a city can have a gender, Nessantico was female…

Once, she had been young and vital: the city, the woman. During her ascension, she had transformed herself into the most famous, the most beautiful, the most powerful of her kind.

She looked at herself now and wondered-as someone might who glimpses herself all unexpected in a mirror and is startled and disturbed by the image staring back-if those attributes still held true.

Oh, she knew that youth was fleeting and ephemeral. After all, the people dwelling within her walls led lives that were short and harsh. For them, the mirrored face changed relentlessly with each passing day until that morning when they realized that the reflection in the silvered glass was lined and tired, that the gray at the temples had spread and whitened. They might feel their joints protesting at a movement that had once required no effort or thought at all, or discover that injuries now required weeks rather than days to heal, or that illnesses lingered like unwelcome guests-or worse, transitioned from “lingering” to “chronic.”

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