Ayrelby

"Ayrelby is like Taiwan. Not in the sense that it’s filled with East-Asian culture or that we eat what the more ignorant of our race would call “Chinese food” or anything literal like that. Ayrelby, Florida, is the farthest place on earth away from literality, metaphorically speaking.

"Once the whole world was like it. It was the opposite of fascism; and it was the opposite of communism, too. Everyone—everything, it seemed—was wrapped in the enamorous winds of holy magic and ordered chaos, and tales of their adventures were told time and time again, until their very names became legend. Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Saint Nicholas; these were the heroes of that ancient land.

"Its name was Edenia, and it was beautiful, simply stated. The magnitude of the gracious glory of this wondrous world was, and is, utterly incomprehensible. But the Masters who ruled this ancient world comprehended it quite clearly, and quite well.

"It was incepted by what you would call a “saint”—you know the one—who came very close to literality by nearly literally falling in love with the Observable Universe. His angelic partners would tease lightheartedly about this strange obsession of his for the physical world, but he cared not in the minimal. This little-infinite realm of matter and energy and time and space intrigued the saint incredibly, so incredibly that he used his powers of holy magic to conjure four guardians to protect it. These were his begotten daughters.

"Akara, she was the eldest and the wisest of the four. She was appointed Mistress of the Wind, and she caused the air to flow in gorgeously balmy breezes night and day.

"Her sister, Gianna, was the Keeper of the Soil, protecting that mysterious realm known as organic matter. She caused the trees to tower and the flowers to bloom.

"The third sibling was called Quoria, and she was appointed the task by the saint to protect a very special molecule: Dihydrogen Monoxide, chemically denoted as H2O. As Defender of the Depths, she caused the rivers to flow and the fish to swim with glee.

"But you know what comes next. It happens in all these stories. Her name was Sabra. Here it comes. She was a loner, and she was not the guardian of anything. No…she was princess. Princess of the Flame, to be precise. And I don’t even have to tell you that she wanted to rule the entire cosmos, or that she revolted against her fellow sisters, or that she was banished to an unused wasteland called the Mulciber, which she shaped into her own image, or that she took several other saints with her in her fall, for you to guess all of that correctly. With her mischievous intentions out of the picture, for thousands of years the world—now called Edenia, as suggested by an anonymous Benefactor—was in a state of adventurous peace and impossible plausibility. But Sabra’s flame would not be so easily put out.

"When a young peasant mistakenly set her free of her hellish imprisonment, the ancient youthen saint reentered the world, turning hard the hearts of men. The three sisters, along with their respective children, and grandchildren then, unanimously decided, with ten heavy hearts, that the only way to keep from watching the world burn was to watch the world drown. And so they did.

"But Akara, the wisest of the counsel, saw favor in a few of her mortal followers: there was a blacksmith named Zizzolas Yong who braved the seas in previous years; and there were Wake Julliard and his brother, Jarbis Lee, and of course their Company of Friends. So the noble Saint Akara instructed the two parties to hide away in a massive boat made from solid diamondwood and phoenix feathers, along with two of every…creature in the land, so that they may repopulate the earth after one thousand days spent aboard the vessel of salvation.

"The plan was enacted almost flawlessly. However, while the world burned underwater and the little god was extinguished, one settlement, one tiny, sparsely populated settlement on the southern edge of an uncharted peninsula, remained intact, due to the purity of those living there. The counsel had agreed, at suggestion by “The Boss”, that if any city had ten good men and women within its walls, ten good men unswayed by the deeds and charm of Sabra, ten good women undaunted in the approximately literal face of death—that city would be spared. There was but one single, solitary town that fit this requirement across the whole globe. That town’s name was Ayrelby.

"The people of the village thrived for the next several millennia, as though nothing at all had become of the world. Eventually, though, strange, white men, riding on great, strong goats, calling themselves, “the Conquistadors,” came and captured the peninsula, naming it for the flowers there that bloomed. Florida they called it. The claimed it for a god called Spain.

"My grandfather told me that story. He told it to me when I was about four or five, and then continued to tell it to my little cousins, more of whom seemed to continue popping up each year. I heard it a lot. I loved that story. I still do. And I believe with all my heart that throughout its entirety, my grandfather never spoke a single lie in its telling.

"Ayrelby is like Taiwan. It started out covering a world, but then was repressed and repressed until here it stands today, the last safe haven of magic, somewhere down the shoreline from Miami, locked within a new world that claims it as its own, but both knowing in reality who truly belongs to whom."

---Colby Davidson, Icarus.