Populus
The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. The once lush and vibrant landscape had become a vast expanse of desert, whose deep fissures etched their way through fractal plates of clay like stretch marks. They seemed to strain upward over the monolithic city walls, to grasp desperately at what scant enduring moisture might still be suspended in the cloudless sky. Perhaps she was projecting. The world had grown tough, in recent years, not to view through a colourless lens. Surface runoff from the nearby mountains, which the Architects had once redirected to flow through the citadel, had been exhausted ages ago… And rainfall had become a rare phenomenon that the Aunts recounted with reverent longing. Groundwater, drawn from aquifers deep beneath the city, had since served as their primary water supply; The majority of which was reserved for maintaining crops and livestock.
