...The city hung between the mortal world and somewhere else entirely, visible only to those who knew how to look, how to step through the veil at precisely the right angle. Inside, the music of the creation-time still played through the stones. Gardens bloomed with flowers that had no names in common tongues. The elves who dwelt there kept the old songs alive, and in keeping them alive, kept alive something essential about beauty and grace that the rest of the world had thought lost forever. Few outsiders had ever seen it. Fewer still were ever allowed to leave. For in that hidden place, nothing was permitted to diminish, nothing allowed to break. It was preservation made manifest, sanctuary built in defiance of entropy itself...