Open Court

            Oren paused at the crest of the final hill and looked down on the city. Below him sprawled Casoria, favored city of Jah, home of the High King, and once the stuff of which legends were made. 

As a boy, he’d believed the walls were thirty feet wide and sixty feet tall while the spires of the castle, capped in gold, crowded heaven. 

Now he surveyed the city below him with a strategist’s eye. It had blossomed in a mushroom sprawl, with no thought to planning or defense. Some streets were crowded with lapping overhangs and heavily trafficked.  Others, broad and level, stopped abruptly, leading nowhere. A cluster of houses -shanties obvious from this distance – peppered the slope leading to Curtain Inlet. There had been a plague, he recalled, and the dying must have been housed there. Oren wondered why they hadn’t been torn down.

Even so, Castle Ursaulis reared timelessly in the sky, its drawbridge down as citizens milled across it. Time, he decided, to make his appearance at Open Court.