Its houses do not move, but the streets between them do. Each morning, when the sun strikes the towers, the city rearranges its pathways. What was once a neighbour becomes a stranger across an unfamiliar square. What was once a familiar route to the market becomes a maze, sending the walker past new thresholds before they can reach the same old stall.
The citizens have grown used to this. They rise with the dawn, open their doors, and step into whatever arrangement awaits them. They greet whoever has been placed at their doorstep that day. They carry offerings, not to old friends, but to new alignments.
Children play a game of running ahead to guess where the streets will open. Sometimes they find themselves at the edge of the city, looking out at the plain. At the boundary, the streets dissolve into dust, as if the city can only extend as far as its people are willing to walk.
At night, the streets shimmer faintly, preparing for the next cut of dawn. The city sleeps, but its structure dreams.
And yet, the city has never collapsed. No matter how the pathways shift, it remains itself: not in the permanence of stones, but in the rhythm of re-construal.
Coda
The city is not a collection of houses. It is the cut of pathways, remade in each construal. What remains is not the form, but the alignment.
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