The Aswals of the Cities

An aswal is a crossing point in any of the underground cities, where multiple understreets come together at a well that opens upward and downward to levels above and below. The life in the City, so rich and varied, seems to pulsate at its most intense, most lovely, and most noisily at these places. The aswals are home to restaurants, shops, stages, displays, markets, bars, and every social aspect and activity. Often an aswal adjoins one of the spiral turnings where the turning, in its slope, intersects with a street level.

The most-common form of an aswal is at an intersection of a ring street in its great arc around the City center and a ray street leading toward and away from that center. But the intersection with an aswal holds an opening in the ceiling and/or the floor that reveals one or more street levels above or below. Each opening of this kind is ringed by a railing.

There are many variations on this basic structure, but the openings are strictly circular, and most commonly between eight and nine meters across. These is usually a circular streetlamp around the opening above, shining downward. At the top level of an aswal, where there is no opening above, the circular lamp is at the edge of a ceiling dome that diffuses light downward.

The variations can be striking and attractive. Aswal Guisanash just above Sobi Zone traverses nine levels including two within Sobi Zone itself at the bottom. It is a huge aswal, its opening about 30 meters across at its widest, with a central columnar helical stair five meters across. The stair, accessed from each floor by a long approach narrowing to each stair entrance, wraps around a granite column, and is visible through a latticework of steel. The fourth tier from the top has a narrow balcony surrounding the stair, from which a guest or a speaker can be visible from all the open levels of the aswal. Railings, as with all other aswals, provide safety to visitors. The central stair penetrates the closed-off floor to reach the two Sobi Zone floors below. At some levels, looking east, the visitor can see a smaller unnamed aswal that lies outside ArCorp‘s andro farm.

West of Aswal Guisanash above the Sobi Zone levels lies Aswar Nagrasai, of much more ordinary appearance. Further west of Aswar Nagrasai is the many-storied South Power Complex, containing one of the great reactors furnishing power to the lower regions of the City. Below the bottom of Aswar Nagrasai lie Sobi and Rumchi Zones. Above is Naga Zone.

Past the South Power Complex to the northwest is Aswar Hendarzha, another aswal with a central five-meter helical stair. This aswal is smaller than Aswal Guisanash in diameter, but each level features four approaches to the stair, each of semitranslucent granite. Aswar Hendarzha gives access at all levels to the power distribution center of the South Power Complex. At its bottom level the visitor can see in the distance the flashing sign of Caladrina‘s Restaurant at Aswar Tyrae.

Aswar Tyrae is one of the City‘s concentrated social hubs. It is not very large, broader than Aswar Nagrasai and less deep, but its five primary levels offer a wide variety of stores, bars, restaurants, displays, and more to see. Two of its aswal railings feature ornate and scriptlike decoration still indecipherable to scholars. The upper tiers of Aswar Tyrae are office and meeting spaces owned by and reserved for corp officials.

North from Aswar Tyrae is the vertical lamp marking Aswal Narr, four levels high. A small aswal, it marks a place of gathering for City dwellers who are involved in coll activities and social movements. Directly above Aswal Narr, sealed off from it by a floor level, is Aswar Trigail, in a relatively little-used sector of the City.

Some notice the suffix sound difference in the term ‘aswal’ when used with different place-names following it. The common language of Tarnus, CLang, has absorbed an appalling variety of linguistic influences that have resulted in such seemingly-senseless variations. A few scholars consider this r-l variation to be partly prosodic, partly-rhetorical, and partly source-language derived, but no one has yet traced a definitive reason for it.