2023/04/26
On the morning of every equinox, the surveyors of Marchesa each leave their posts with cartfuls of paint, spending the day walking and marking the borders of the empire. The painting starts at the clean, empty beaches in the north, and ends at the absolute rear of this year's southern front, a front always adorned and scattered with twisted rebar, tattered cloth, and fingers liberated from their hands. Reading maps, painting lines, writing maps.
At the end of the day, when each surveyor moves to their neighbour's post, they give their incomplete map to their appointed messenger, and the line segments sent and assembled into one, grand shape at the central palace.
If you're ever lucky enough to see the map yourself, it's a sight to behold. Fine grids of irregular squares dominated by hundreds of concentric, jagged circles. It'll remind you of an old tree's stump, where each ring shows the growth and age of Marchesa.
When you're done viewing and done visiting, leaving the palace and walking the streets, devoid of pedestrians and birds, you'll feel a long and crushing silence as you walk back home. That silence will remind you of what trees are actually made of. The center of a tree is dead and hardened, keeping itself upright as it grows outward, leaving behind jagged rings of its own corpse.
You may also wonder, as you reach for your keys, what'll happen when its front is pushed all the way down south, and back up north; back to its clean, empty beaches.