When a child is born in Illia, a room is added to the outside of the parents’ house. As the child ages, the room is enlarged and divided until it has rooms of its own. Some never reach the size of their parents’, and some swell to many times their parents’ house’s size. Some are ill-tethered, and when they fall, a new line is established, but most remain part of the original structure, and so to see Illia at night is to see a many-limbed formation like a coral, made luminous by the lichens and fungi that decorate the youngest generations.
Young families are wavering and clumsy as they climb and slowly branch. The oldest and most successful lines are broad and towering, immense and graceful as they coil toward the sky and to each other, until it becomes uncertain where each line began. Old houses without children appear as gaping holes in the orange luminescence. If too many remain alongside each other, a cavity forms, and the ambrosial city of Illia seems a hollow thing built on memory and rot.