They told us it was a miracle and a mistake and three different kinds of paperwork, depending on who was answering and how polite they wanted to be about coffins. I, who am a cat and therefore allergic to euphemisms, prefer the word that smells right: translation. The Great City was translated, not by angels with tidy wings or demons with tidy teeth, but by something that read our tongues badly and decided to keep our accent. One night the sky over Glasshelm went thin like the membrane of a drum, and the wards that had been humming since before anyone thought of calling it Empire hiccupped as if somebody had put a finger to the wrong note. It was soft at first—the kind of sound that pretends to be nothing until it is a whole new grammar—and then the air folded in on itself and the city sighed like a thing that had been holding its breath for centuries and finally remembered it had lungs. Nobody at the council table had expected the room to start spinning that loudly. They were all very dignified about it afterward, of course; there was an official statement and a lot of italics and some very earnest committee work. Before the committees could agree on the hymn to sing, our world had been yanked out of its pocket and dropped onto a table where the map had never heard our name.
Imagine, if you will, an orchestra where someone has swapped the conductor for a raccoon who likes rhythm but hates rules. The ley-lines stuttered, the satellites hiccupped their polite updates, and arc-cores poured themselves into emergency song like drunks with perfect pitch. AirCentralia's zeppelins found themselves sailing through a sky that offered them a new kind of wind—wind with an attitude—and Barco's captains woke up with a taste for salt that came from an ocean that did not belong to any chart the Empire had ever ordered. The Dominion mines, which had been coaxed into obedient ore and the occasional rebellion, began to sing in a key the forges on Memoyden had never heard; their furnaces spat blue light and the rocks solved themselves into new problems. For all our best engineers—those proud men and women who could make a tank sing and a storage ring blush—this was a problem like a joke told in a language their textbooks had never bothered to learn.
We tried to be practical about it, as our kind does when the ground under us starts performing existential stunts. The Emperor convened, the Grand Minister arranged his papers like a moat, and my human—Mhelfrancovince—went out into the blue and touched it. Gods, that was not a metaphor. He reached his hands into the city's new ribs and began to rearrange them. He moved earth with the same gentle impatience with which a man might tuck a child's blanket back over a sleeping face, and in doing so he showed the truth of power: it can be a pet, if you train it well, or a hammer, if you are not careful. He chose to be a pet that bites when necessary, which is to say he chose to make work of it. We patched wards with plant roots that learned the new sky's accent faster than the scholars, and we borrowed the patience of rivers and the temper of iron. It was less a crossing than a negotiation: the world asking, "Who are you?" and the City answering with all the loud things it had brought to the table—guns and medicine, salmon pâté, and a Parliament that could still argue at the best of times.
There was a theory, fashionable among certain melancholy clergy and very nervous ministers, that the translation was an old thing waking up and stretching. Another theory, preferred by those who like to imagine themselves clever and like their cleverness with a side of proof, was that someone had designed a corridor between worlds and then forgotten to put a doorkeeper on duty. I do not know; I am a cat and I prefer stories where the truth has nice pacing. What I do know is this: the city arrived with our manners, our debts, and three very inconvenient inheritances—arc-ore, arrogance, and a population that thought century-old precedent could solve a problem that hadn't even been invented yet. Our gold still looked like gold, but it tasted faintly of otherness; our laws still read like laws, but they had acquired footnotes the Emperor had never approved and that the Grand Minister did not have the stomach to delete.
The newcomers—the dozens of races with their own leagues of custom and hurt—were not exactly thrilled to be introduced to us. Picture an awkward dinner party where the neighbor brings a salad and you bring a tank and someone proposes marriage to keep the peace. Some welcomed trade, which is the polite word for "we will take your tech and keep your recipe for toast." Others wanted the arc-ore back because you do not mine a holy mountain and then hand it over without a cheque and a ritual I.O.U. There were skirmishes, the small polite wars of newly acquainted states. We learned the hard way that magic does not make you immune to offense—if anything it sharpens the offense until it reads like etiquette. The Great City's first ambassadors were either brilliant or very tired; Nikkibella, as you might expect, became a walking treaty with better posture and worse snacks for anyone who tried to cross her without reading the fine print.
The way we left, and the way we arrived, matters for what came after; an empire transplanted is like a transplanted tree—root shock is a thing and sometimes the tree takes up residence in a different kind of soil. We had to relearn the mineral grammar beneath our feet. Dominion's arenas of extraction did not behave like Dominion's back home. The M13 Earth Dragons learned that a ley-storm could peal their wards like orange skin, and AirCentralia had to teach its captains that wind could be an enemy that preferred altitude to etiquette. Our engineers, clever as magpies, tried to adapt: Frankie Otherworldy drafted domestic appliances that would not revolt, NetherArms designed armor that would not melt in the rain, and the Royal Bank worried about rings that now hummed in an accent foreign enough to freeze credit at the very moment citizens needed it most.
Some people said we should apologize and leave. Some said we should stay and make good on what we did not ask to be. There were louder voices that appreciated a new world as an opportunity to remake ledgers with extra zeros. Parliament became the theater of a thousand petulant acts: committees, subcommittees, sub-subcommittees, and one particularly memorable motion to rebrand the entire incident as "The Great Relocation" which passed only after the Ministry of Information suggested a catchy logo and a discount at Chongke Cola. That motion was the true spirit of our age—where history is a product and nostalgia is sold on installment.
We found, in the rubble and the unexpected alleyways, the economy's sense of humor. JN Bazaar sold trinkets to merchants from other realms who liked our gadgets for reasons presumed to be practical and which often turned out to be very aesthetic. Chongke Cola found a local sweetener that made people confess everything they thought about their exes, which was a sales spike and a diplomatic incident. NetherArms discovered that their loyalty sigils went about being loyal in ways they had not considered: occasionally these sigils became so persuasive that soldiers forgot to ask for leave and loved their work in a way that made the families uncomfortable. There was accidental comedy in our tragedies, which is to say there was capitalism.
In the middle of all that, the three of them—Francorleone, Mhelvayne, and Mhelfrancovince—remained the city's emergency contact numbers, the thunderclap when you needed one and a ledger when you didn't. Their mana reserves are ungodly not because gods are generous but because we, collectively, have been very good at hoarding lightning. That hoarding saved us and damn near ruined us. They sealed a ley-node in Glasshelm with the kind of ritual that would make a cathedral blush; they rewired a district's wards using methods the scholars called "slightly unethical and oddly effective." The Emperor signed treaties with a hand steady enough to make them legal and dramatic; the Grand Minister made sure the correct boxes were checked even while he broke more than one rule in the name of preservation. Mhelfrancovince—my human, my favorite lap-warmer who is theatrically reluctant about titles—pulled people out of burning things and then went home and tried not to read the newspapers.
We will not pretend the translation was a clean moral victory. There were things we took that should have stayed sacred; there were bargains we struck under less-than-saintly candles. The Dominion's mines could have been handed back with genuine apologies and reparations, but our bellies—and our political class—did not find it tidy to apologize without transactional addenda. That is how compromise is manufactured in the Great City: you add a clause and call it stability. Some of our children—IssaMayari, bless her bones—stood in factory gates and said that you cannot put a price on a life, and people applauded in Parliament because applause is cheaper than action. There were protests with slogans that rhymed and riots with choreography. There were betrayals that were petty and betrayals that cut like newly sharpened blades. We took the new world's hospitality without first learning the table manners, and for that we paid.
If the question you want answered is whether we deserved translation, I will tell you what every practical creature knows: merit is a convenient myth. Translation happened because something with enough power had the whim to do so, and because we were the kind of polity that could be moved. We are significant in the way a cathedral is significant: not because we are whole and perfect but because we occupy a notable position on the landscape. Being transported did not make us heroic; it made us inconvenient and interesting. It made us a problem other people would solve for their own reasons and an experiment in how quickly a City can remake itself when the rules change.
I have watched us learn new grammar. We now know which ores sing wrong and which wind will steal a zeppelin's hat. We now have treaties stamped on vellum and on the underside of a coal cart; we now have a bank that makes a show of reform while quietly reassigning its worst accounts to places called Funbari Hill and Royale Dungeon City where light is a suggestion and paperwork fears the dark. The Great City is stitched back together with the sort of civic duct tape that smells like smoke and optimism. It is, in short, still our catastrophe and therefore still our responsibility.
And me? I will continue to be the cat who remembers what people prefer to forget. I will curl on the ledger and blacken a signature if it looks suspicious. I will sit in the back of audiences like a very furry footnote. I will be useful and sarcastic in equal measure. If the city is to be a translation, then let it be a translation that keeps an honest glossary at the back. Let it remember that we arrived with baggage and unapologetic taste. Let it remember that when the world asks us who we think we are, the right answer is never simple and often requires a good nap.
So we remain, in this peculiar, translated state: hungry, defensive, hopeful, and frequently funny in ways that offend certain committees. We are learning to speak new languages badly and to make excellent coffee where there was none. We are building, bargaining, punishing, forgiving, voting, and sometimes laughing in the face of a sky that will, from time to time, decide to cough up an entirely new problem. If the city survives this, it will not be because of the gods or the mana alone; it will be because a certain cat learned to keep a particularly sharp pen and because a man who can hold continents in his hands prefers to spend himself on other people. Which is to say: we may yet be salvageable. But bring a coat; the wind has opinions now, and it likes to be dramatic.