It’s a living map much like the one of the Capitol on level six, only smaller and not built to the same meticulous scale. There are a dozen of them spread out on raised platforms throughout the space, each one with a different city built upon it. Inspecting the nearest, Dyeawan begins to see that it is the Capitol, or at least a version of it. There’s no mistaking the Spectrum, but there’s little else she recognizes. Several buildings resembling the Spectrum that don’t exist in the Capitol are erected in the model.

Stone plaques identify each city, but not by their Crachian designations, which are all numerical except for the Capitol. Each city modeled here has a name, and though Dyeawan isn’t far along enough in her studies of language to read them all, she can make out the words on the plaque in front of the Capitol.

It reads: GOD STONE.

“Do you know what mythology is, Slider?” Edger asks her.

“I… think so. It’s stories, like you said, only… stories that were supposed to have happened a long time ago. They’re about us, or about a people, only they’re not really true. They were made up by grandfathers and grandmothers to tell about the world around them.”

“That’s very good, yes. Myth can be very powerful. It can inspire people, and mislead them. Next to religion, mythology is the most dangerous kind of story. Once people mythologize a place or a person or an event, they become attached to it in a way that can be impossible to break them of. The ones who came before me, who built the first Planning Cadre, they knew this.”

“This is Crache, isn’t it?” she asks him, eyes frantically moving from model to model. “These are all the cities of Crache, but… different.”

“This is before Crache,” he explains. “This is the land as it was. Every city as we know it now was its own kingdom, its own realm in that time. They were disjointed, fragmented, constantly warring with one another. And do you know why?”

“Mythology?”

“Yes. Its people mythologized everything. Their cities, their rivers and lakes, even this little island on which we chose to build our Planning Cadre. They gave them fantastical names and legends. And people? Oh, they mythologized people to near-god heights. Their rulers were eight-feet-tall magicians who could split rocks with a hard stare, if you believed their stories. They mythologized entire families and called it ‘nobility.’ And it made the mythologized drunk with power and imagined legacy. They unleashed their false superiority on one another and the so-called lower class at every turn, and the people who believed in the myth of them followed and fought and submitted and suffered the worst.”

“That sounds… awful,” Dyeawan admits.