Porte Noire, A City for the Dying

There's a place in Porte Noire where the dead dance with the devil underneath bright neon light and that place is called Paradise. All art in this post by Jeremy Mann. Take a hundred circuses and drape them over a chunk of city. Then spread them out and fill in the openings with burlesque dancer stages, brothels, jazz shops, bars and clubs of a 100 stripes, love hotels, casinos, and massive magician performance centers and you crafted its form. It's Las Vegas meets New Orleans meets Dubai and its a Paradise in all ways. Now fill it in with the desperate souls of the dying. Why would these people come to this particular stretch of Porte Noire? Roll a 1d8 on the below. Love. They believe a forbidden love denied to them can be found or reached in Paradise. Escapism. They lived their entire life wanting to escape into another's, and they lose themselves here in Paradise. Addiction. They were addicted to something (sex, drugs, alcohol, dance, performing) a...

There are no stars in Porte Noire's sky. No sun shines, and no moon tells secrets. The only light comes from the lamps, and the city, and the electrics of the city. You cannot see that everyone around you is dead. You cannot see that you are dead. You cannot find what you want. You cannot find the reason that you shouldn't find it. A black man in a black suit playing the flute on the side of the street watches as you kill an armored knight in a back ally with a pick axe and garrote wire. The Hoodoo Man selling you gris-gris in Coven Lane asks you to do him a favor, listens to your answer, watches how you use the gris-gris and what you use it for. Underneath a sky as black as obsidian, where the River Styx, or the Gihon, or the Hubur, or the God River (all the same River that flows through a different world) runs free, the souls of the desperate dead are brought to Porte Noire. You cannot sail back. You can go further, into an afterlife beyond Porte Noire, but fragmen...

A man dies. He dies in war. He dies with a sword in his hand and three arrows in his stomach and bloody curses bubbling from his lips. He dies in the mud, surrounded by the shit and piss and viscera of his comrades, and he dies wishing he could have known what it would have been like to finish that sculpture he had been working on. To have displayed in the city, the capital city, to meet other artists, artists who maybe grew up in a small village like he did ridiculed and treated like shit. --- An old woman lies in her bed and feels something other than sleep wrapping its cold talons across her throat. She knows she will not see the morning. No dreams nor nightmares will accost her and no longer will she rot before her family. But she wishes she could live just a little bit longer. Her daughter is pregnant again, but the doctors said this child would live past infancy. How cruel fate is to take her before she could see the one thing that would keep her line alive. --- ...

...  And now you may enter Porte Noire.