Tir-na Nog'th

All quotes here come from Sign of the Unicorn.

Tir-na Nog'th is Amber's ghostly reflection in the sky. It appears on moonlit nights, and can be accessed from a staircase at the top of Kolvir.

When the moon rose and the apparition of Amber came faintly into the heavens, stars showing through it, pale halo about its towers, tiny flecks of movement upon its walls, I waited on the highest crop of Kolvir, there where the three steps are fashioned, roughly, out of the stone…

When the moonlight touched them, the outline of the entire stairway began to take shape, spanning the great gulf to that point above the sea the vision city held. When the moonlight fell full upon it, the stair had taken as much of substance as it would ever possess, and I set my foot on the stone… Illusion of distance and time… The stairs through the Corwin-ignoring sky escalate somehow, for it is not a simple arithmetic progression up them once motion has commenced. I was here, I was there, I was a quarter of the way up before my shoulder had forgotten the clasp of Ganelon's hand… If I looked too hard at any portion of the stair, it lost its shimmering opacity and I saw the ocean far below as through a translucent lens… I lost track of time, though it seems it's never long, afterward…

At the head of the stair, I entered, coming into the ghost city as one would enter Amber after mounting the great forestair up Kolvir's seaward face.

Tir is a place of visions of the present and future, but those visions are never guaranteed to be accurate, or even probable.

Silence and silver… Walking away from the rail, leaning on my stick, passing through the fog-spun, mist-woven, moonlight-brushed fabric of vision within the troubling city… Ghosts… Shadows of shadows… Images of probability… Might-bes and might-havebeens… Probability lost… Probability regained…

Tir mirrors Amber City's appearance, for the most part.

I had come to the place where the ghosts play at being ghosts, where the omens, portents, signs, and animate desires thread the nightly avenues and palace high halls of Amber in the sky, Tir-na Nog'th…

Turning, my back to the rail and dayworld's vestiges below, I regarded the avenues and dark terraces, the halls of the lords, the quarters of the low… The moonlight is intense in Tir-na Nog'th, silvers over the facing sides of all our imaged places… Stick in hand, I passed forward, and the strangelings moved about me, appeared at windows, on balconies, on benches, at gates… Unseen I passed, for truly put, in this place I was the ghost to whatever their substance…

Silence and silver… Only the tapping of my stick, and that mostly muted… More mists adrift toward the heart of things… The palace a white bonfire of it… Dew, like drops of mercury on the finely sanded petals and stems in the gardens by the walks… The passing moon as painful to the eye as the sun at midday, the stars outshone, dimmed by it… Silver and silence… The shine…

Sans colors, all… Only the essentials sketched in, degrees of luminosity in silver the terms of their claim on the eye. Only the essentials here.

The ghosts in Tir cannot normally be interacted with. Only a Pattern blade allows communication and contact.

Mine is the power to be heard here… It hangs in the sheath at my side. Drawing Grayswandir, I raise my blade overhead where moonlight tricks its patterns into a kind of motion. I place it on the ground between us.
Corwin, Sign of the Unicorn

Time passes strangely in Tir. This is always a danger, because the city dissolves with the dawn, and anyone still up there will likely fall to their death. Moreover, the stability of the city depends on moonlight, and when a cloud occludes the moon, this can prove similarly problematic for anyone visiting the city.

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