Dis, the Iron City

In the poem it is the city that holds the whole rest of the descent inside it, and its walls look like iron; in the game it is a circular wall with nine towers besides the one over the gate, the main gate opening north towards the ledge and the breach opposite it, where the bank falls away towards the ravine.

Ledge and city are one single piece of floor, and what divides them is masonry rather than rock: a rock wall reads as the edge of the world, a wall of dressed stone reads as something built by somebody who is keeping you out. The door leaf sits six centimetres inside the frame on each side, and that gap is the ember you see from far off: it is the only part of the gate that reads at ten metres.

Nobody lives inside. This is not stone, it is iron, and behind it begins the city of the sins that need reason, next to which the circles above will look mild. The houses are furnaces, one in four is built with an interior, and what frightens here is not the towers but the blind corners.