Jotama

The soft summer air carries butter-thick petals of honeysuckle, and the oudh oils perfuming all necks and wrists this year, and the wind-chimes of an evening call to prayer, interlaced and all at once creating a delectable feast for the senses. Young people perch on the viaduct, some ostentatious senses of dress giving the many tourists away from locals, pressing creases into paper to give it new life before placing their delicate creations into the River Orlema and letting them float in whichever direction pleases them. Other people emerge from buildings both dwelling and public: families, older citizens, small children clutching parents' bejewelled hands, as they join the murmuring, unified step of the crowd making its slow and contented way toward the temple.

Those chimes and bells not wrenched from their stands by force and also, somehow, managing to withstand the might of erosion and time, make distorted sounds every so often which are best described as pollution. The City of a Thousand Cities is hardly a City of one anymore, and the rural areas once considered the Jotaman government's worst failure of development are now indistinguishable from the unkempt garden which has overtaken the entire land.

There is no longer any such place as Jotama. In place of the harmononious sounds which once emerged here, there is moaning, gargling, the dragging of skin against surfaces, the squelch of wet soil, the squeak of condensation rubbed from windows to gain vantage points, the occasional scream that pierces the air. Jotama is, at least, not quiet. Jotama is a symphony. The dense extant population of zombies is never fully accounted for, and so when it appears to diminish, that appearance cannot be trusted. Vast swathes of the land, once carefully cultivated, including whole sectors of once-Orlema, are therefore abandoned, and only some portions carefully and with much force reclaimed. The styles associated with the lost areas are lost, too, as are the practices both Faithful and artistic. A loss that had to have happened, of course; one that must, too, be counted against the gains won. After all, such a vast and resource-rich land was going unused and therefore being wasted; in the future, land use will be much more thorough, and more resourceful. Excepting, of course, those areas never reclaimed, which are soon forgotten about.

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