Night enfolds the sleeping city, shadows unfurling like wings across deserted streets and empty parks. Many of the painted townhouses stand vacant. In others, people succumb to the insomnia of ordinary worries – misbehaving children, unpaid bills, stressful jobs – or dream of the extraordinary that has become commonplace: blazes caused by gods, friends vanished into cults, the Society’s reassurances that everything is fine. Everything will be just fine, so long as everyone listens. So long as everyone believes them.
Across the city, in a nearly abandoned neighborhood that used to belong to politicians and lobbyists, the gods are awake. In the strange embassies of the seven tricksters willing to live in this place, to risk everything that they are, the inhabitants never sleep. They slept for thousands of years, after all.
The pyramid of Set House rises from a jungle. Milk-white columns front the temple of Hermes House. The black fortress of Loki House juts into a night as dark as its walls. Rough hide slants into the massive teepee of Coyote House. The bright tiers of Tezcatlipoca House stand on barren sand. A sacred grove of thick trees surrounds the ornate shrine of Legba House, situated at the convergence of two wide red-and-black paths. And at the end of the property, the ziggurat of Enki House towers over a marsh.
