‘There is nothing to choose but freedom!’ yelled the preacher in ecstatic rapture, swaying in the centre of the empty red stage.

  ‘There's nothing to choose but freedom! Freedom!’

  Above his head flapped heavy, with the sea-salt-soaked, old and stinking black flag of the rebel’s city everyone called the Seventh. The entire face of the faded black banner was stained in every language that had ever existed with a single word.

  Freedom.

  Black on black, bright fluor on the crooked pole whitened by many palms. Freedom! There is no choice but her. The shriek of the sleeping albatross as the ship's mast pierces its swift breast. The rebel cry, the prayer and the curse, countless high souls stubbornly striving for something no one can tell anything about. No one knows what freedom is...

  SilentBlack: There is such a legend in the world of Cube... They say it started just before the old system collapsed. Maybe they made it up, maybe it's true. The legend of the Seventh City. If you seek for ultimate freedom – it’s your bloody place to be. By the way, it was actually supposed to be called the Fifth, but the rebels always had something with logic, like they reject it. Or something like that.

  Stop, wait... There's nowhere to go if there's no freedom. That seemed to be their point.

  SilentBlack: It's all because SobisDragon once said he found a fifth way, the Way of the Rebel. Rejecting everything known and going where no one has gone before. To invent new things and listen to no one at all. He called it the word freedom. Some people think it's all crap.

  SilentBlack: But freedom is so big. Of all of them who got there, nobody really owned it. Not even Sobis himself, I think. All he could do was proclaim the path as a new principle. And to create a haven for those who were just as crazy. In two versions, on two continents. For symmetry, haha!

  Maybe this freedom of theirs really exists, or maybe it's bullshit one hundred percent bullshit of bullshit - I don't know. But, one way or another, the city was created, and Sobis was satisfied.

  He chose the location, created the design, launched the legend. In short, as it should be. Some people think Dragon, and he's the only one we've got, went crazy after that. Even more, he became an imbecile. But I don't think so. It's just that his thoughts are very weird to understand. Have you ever tried to understand a dragon? Here, it's the same thing...

  Guest_Yuten01: you don't fuck with what you don't know! The Seventh was originally created as an outpost against Limbo. It's the kind of grey nothingness I wouldn't wish on anyone. It drains one's energy before one even knows where to go. And since most, except the rebels, know where to go, it's the rebels who are most often swept out to Limbo. Believe me, it's horrible. By mistake of the developers, I guess, since it was unclear where to put them. They seem to be promising folk, but you can't manipulate them or use them in any other way. So they used to send them to Limbo.

  Until Thanatos, our god of death, got fed up with this arrangement. Thanatos was the first to recognize the independence of this city.

  SilentBlack: Independence from what?

  Guest_Yuten01: From everything. From light and darkness, gods and demons, all the game rules, and from even the names on the walls in the universe's WCs. No one dares to infringe on the Seventh's freedom. Basically, Thanatos just didn't want to ruin some of the living. Out of boredom, I guess.

  Guest_Yuten01: Sobis and Thanatos... One made the other immortal. Because of love. What else would make immortality worthwhile? Sobis loves the rebels. Like a noble fairy tale. Like some kind of impossible weird dragon dream...

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  Usually on a day like this, hot and windless, Sobis dangled from one of the city's giant ribs like a garland. He lounged in the sun, watching for rebel ships coming into their harbour. Usually he always stayed in the Seventh of Salt, one of the two versions of the city. It had no soil and was simply suspended in a clever way from the many steel ropes and cables the city had stolen from different worlds.

  They were all excellent pirates. Pirates and monks, a very freaky mix.

  Instead of soil, there's water in the Seventh of Salt. The salty sea where the dragon was once born. Where he once died. When the seas were much deeper and the salt even saltier.

  The giant ribcage of an old dragon had become a haven for the city. It now stuck out of the water like an ugly system of bizarre arches. Once it had been a place of battle. Now it had become a place of hope for thousands of those who had not found peace and had not become fallen or holy. The dead dragon was called Sobis the First, while the living one was always called Sobis the Second.

  No one knew why, but there was a legend among the rebels that the bones where the city now rested had once belonged to the first version of Sobis. He had once been stopped by some god, preventing him from ruining the whole game. Which is exactly what he wanted.

  After losing the battle, Sobis the First won immortality. It was then that he first met Thanatos, who led him through secret paths back to the world of the living. And so Sobis the Second was born. No one knew if it was true, and Sobis the Second never supported the legend. But he never denied it either.

  He rarely spoke at all, preferring to observe the life and the ongoing construction of the city. No street there had ever lasted long enough for anyone to remember its name. They remembered the names of those who lived there. And that was it. Everything else was a ruin, like the entire city assembled from various wrecks. From whatever the rebels managed to gather. Found, bought, or stolen in their endless forays and long wanderings in search of freedom, or at least a hole into which to see it for what it was.

  ‘Holes in the sky! Brothers! We'll crack open that old poster and climb out in the rags of our own cells. Freedom! There's no choice but that!’ the preacher continued to languish in the red heat of the sun.

  He grinned at the dragon and closed his eyes again. He had arrived in the city recently and introduced himself as Jay Dee, or simply JD. The Seventh City didn't ask for the truth.

  The preacher's face was still grey, as if he was still losing the remnants of his mind in the ash storms of Limbo. Very many in the Seventh knew that dead grey colour, hard to wash out. They had a remedy against the greyness, however. The rebels were cunning and knew how to survive. Sobis the Second smiled back with all his fangs and blew at the newcomer with the sea air that always gathered in his lungs.

  ‘Hey, damn it, you broke the vision!’ yelled the latter. He picked up a rock from the metal platform dangling above the water and threw it at the dragon. The dragon only laughed. Silently and merrily.

  ‘Shut up Jay!’ said the rebel watching him named Ray, with a lazy drawl, ‘before we'll get a lot more yokels like you.’

  ‘Fuck you, Ray. You have meat grinder instead of brain!’ the preacher spit in the water.

  ‘That meat grinder will grind up more than your whining, my friend,’ Ray grinned back, and prepared for the inevitable outburst of hatred that so often shook JD.

  To his surprise, JD didn't respond. He stared dreamily at the city's giant famous lantern that everyone called the Mechanical Sun of the Seventh.

  ‘I've been where you wouldn't dare go, Ray,’ he murmured, so quietly that the old man couldn't hear him.

  The dragon slid down from the metal beam and slipped lightning-fast into the still, hot water. The Seventh's Sun, its own, powered by a complex mechanism invented by one of them, greatly annoyed the gods and those under their control. It creaked softly on a rusty cable and stubbornly cast a soft yellow light on the city. The Sun of the Seventh burned always.

  At times someone joked that the rebels had simply forgotten how to turn it off at night. It wasn't true. Technically the city was savvy perfectly. After all very much they depended on all these technical devices. That Sun shone always to show the way to those who sought it and to annoy those who didn't like it.

  Those kind avoided the city. For those who wished for darkness at night, the city gave out glasses called Thanatos goggles. Black and completely impervious to light, so that even at noon you could be alone with yourself. For many, these glasses were a substitute for sleep. And for the longing for death.

  Because who chose the Seventh agreed to immortality in the name of seeking the myth, because of which, apparently, Thanatos himself had lost his peace....

  Freedom... There's nothing to choose but freedom....