The place I come from has many names, most of them depending on the person, with no one name more common than another, and so it is simplest to call the place home.

The population is split into two parts: the Artists and the others. The Artists are from all time periods and disciplines of Earth's artistic tradition, both East and West. (Or so I am told; I've yet to go to this 'Earth.') Not only the fine arts are represented; philosophy, architecture, and makers of fine jewelry are also present. These men and women - the past, present, and future of Earth - appear in this place at the height of their creativity, with the memories of their lives intact. Their dream homes appear in whatever city they most favored, although it's not uncommon for an Artist to have more than one home in various cities.

The non-Artists, on the other hand, must build their homes (or, as occasionally happens, buy the home of an Artist), and work at whatever profession they can find. They are, in a sense, the support staff; they are spouses, children, and siblings of the Artists, with little to no artistic talent of their own. The original non-Artists, so the story goes, were the offspring of some of the first Artists to arrive here. That kind of thing still happens - often - but there is also a large part of the population who were born of only one Artist parent, or only non-Artists parents.

The other, essential difference between Artists and their more prosaic counterparts is lifespan. The Artists are forever in their prime; while they may appear to die (most often of duels or chemical overdoses), they simply move into a 6-month waiting period before resuming their lives as normal. The process of apparent death is generally referred to as "passing into the West." The non-Artists, on the other hand, live and die normally for their time period.

The world has places in common with Earth, but the geography is distinctly not Earth's. Dublin and London are a mere dozen miles apart, with Paris perhaps twenty miles distant from the both; no body of water separates the three (although the Thames, Liffe, and Seine still flow into the same ocean), and portions of Ireland, England, and France are replicated between and beyond the cities themselves. (I was shown a map of the place they call Earth once; the distances and bodies of water between the cities and their countries looked quite odd.) The stone tower of William Butler Yeats stands on the road from Ireland to Paris, and Calais straddles the road from Paris to London. Athens, Venice, and Rome stand in this world as well; to the East, cities like Hong Kong, Bombay, Beijing, and Tokyo draw the Artists of the Orient. Other cities have names unlike anything I saw on that map of Earth: Kirin, Haute Terre, and Xanadu, for example.

Some cities - like London - have thriving underground districts; others are completely deserted by the Artists every spring. Almost all of the cities - with rare exceptions - are a mish-mash of styles, where Roman and Grecian villas might share a curb with Victorian townhouses, Tudor mansions, and 100-story apartment units.

I cannot deny that this just isn't the kind of place someone with strong moral convictions would want to leave a child during the formative years of youth. With the Artists come their virtues and their vices. Alcoholism, addiction, acute nymphomania, alternate lifestyles, sexual fetishes and perversions - all are present and not uncommon. Most cities have a thriving culture of prostitutes, drug dealers, and bartenders - just another service provided by the non-Artist community.

My apartment, incidentally, is above a butcher's shop on the Rue de la Paix, just a few blocks from les Jardins des Tuileries and la Louvre, but Montmartre and I are old, old friends; after all, I am an Artist, and I have my vices...