A huge cheer went up when Amel stood in the center of the garden and looked up and around himself to acknowledge the crowd. Indeed, it was a roar.

Then he turned to the tilled earth and appeared to inspect it, though I suspected he’d known it was ready before he came. When the first sun rays hit the garden soil, Amel laid the “seed” or the luminous white egg on the ground. He handled this thing as though it were fragile, but I wonder. Perhaps this was reverence. Perhaps he had hoards of such seeds or eggs stored away.

Whatever the case, almost immediately the egg or seed, in the clear rays of the sun, began to vibrate and then to break open at which point the musicians began to play and the whole crowd began to sing.

This truly was the music we had heard before our birth. This had to be its origin! The seed now exploded in great translucent shoots and stalks and what might have been leaves. Amel stepped back, and indeed everyone stepped out of the garden patch and allowed the building to grow.

Translucent stalks, shoots, leaves, whatever they were, gave off a crackling noise that I could scarcely hear for all the singing, and before our very eyes, a giant tower sprang into being and grew out and up and up until a fully detailed building rose before us, sprouting windows and balconies as it grew. Through the crystalline clarity of its walls we could see its shining floors, doorways, inner chambers blossoming and enlarging, and so many myriad details being realized that it was dizzying and impossible to watch the development of any one aspect, the tower soon rising hundreds of feet above us, rivaling the towers around it, the singing and the music of the instruments not reaching their highest volume until a great skyscraper existed there, complete, it seemed, in all its exterior and interior detail. Down through the earth, I figured, went its foundational roots, the earth being churned around them, and the air was filled with the scent of soil and water until at last this great soaring tower, as tall as the others around it, was settled, ceased to tremble or vibrate, and stood still and firm in the sparkling sunlight.

People cheered and screamed and we rushed around to one side, hoping to catch a glimpse of Amel again as he returned to his pod and drove away. He was a man roughly the size of Garekyn, roughly your build, Lestat, with a similar dexterity and grace.

Of course we knew that the music and the chanting had nothing to do with the magic of what happened, but I thought it a marvelous idea, as it made all who were assembled there feel as if they had participated in the building’s birth.

We had a multitude of questions for those around us, and the people we asked were agreeable to explaining.