sanba is a strip of lakta in the rain shadow of the sanba mountains. here, there are lizard people. they have vertical eyes to help with vision in different light levels, and they are generally visually oriented. despite the lack of rain, fog collects on the mountainsides, causing the evolution of plants specialized in absorbing moisture from the air. by the coast there are mostly cacti.

there are many small towns in sanba, without a big city to center them. the buildings are also built far from one another. this creates many worlds, each inward looking. i used to think this was strange, sad, parochial. but it has its own beauty. the older i get, the more i am disenchanted with the centeredness and hierarchies of my home lindor.

i went to school here some time, where i met azalea, and i saw but did not yet meet clementine. also forsythia is from here, and she used to work on a pier in a coastal town.

the mountain near my school is snow capped in the winter. my first roommate biked up the mountain road every few weeks. i wanted to go too. i made many attempts, each of which got me slightly closer to god, but never quite halfway up the mountain. there was a small valley part of the way up with a stream, the only one i’ve ever seen in sanba. i liked to sit there and watch it trickle.

there are several schools here, each a monastery. mine worshipped ugliness. clementine’s worshipped thinking and it had many arches. another worshipped beauty and it had many walled gardens. another worshipped transparency and it had many pedestals. another worshipped justice and it had many cacti. one of the things my school taught was physics, and they began by teaching about spacetime. this makes sense if you consider that sanba natives gain a deep familiarity with spacetime in their daily lives. later, they also taught about quantum mechanics, which makes sense if you consider that sanba natives gain a deep familiarity with multiple worlds.

sanba is a dreamlike place. this is in part due to the ambient mana that the wind brings down from trapzon. this has the effect of slowing down time in the environment. visitors from abroad will initially act at their usual rate, but as the mana infiltrates their bodies over the course of days, they too will slow down. sanba is dreamlike also because it is sparsely built, and under the hot sun or a blanket of fog, it can sometimes feel like you are alone in the world. i often return in my dreams to sanba, always walking in a spaceless and timeless plane, the distant mountains never getting closer.

one time i visited sanba with clementine. we walked around the schools and i showed her the lonely world that i found for myself. then we went to a bigger town and she showed me the warm world that her friends lived in. in this world, everyone is selfless and nurturing. it’s a place i would never have found without clementine. i wonder how many places like that there are in the world…