#10 Keep the portal
A Glanz from The City of Ash
Keep the portal open. We demand the right to cross between Esch and the City of Ash—not once a year, but whenever the city begins to forget who it has excluded. No city should have the power to exile its own possibilities forever.
You know us as the Glanz. You believe we come from another city.
We do not. We come from every part of Esch that could no longer remain within its borders.
Whenever a neighborhood disappeared, a promise was abandoned, a language fell silent, or another way of living was declared obsolete, someone crossed into Ash. We did not leave by choice. We were produced by the city itself. Ash exists because Esch has always generated more lives, memories, and futures than it was willing to recognize.
For generations, the passage between our cities has remained almost entirely closed. We are permitted to return only on rare occasions, under the supervision of the Aen, who maintain the separation between our worlds. They believe the border protects the city. We believe it protects the illusion that only one version of Esch has ever existed.
Our demand is therefore simple:
Keep the portal open.
Not permanently without care, but permanently as a possibility. A city should never lose contact with what it has excluded. Every redevelopment, every political decision, every act of forgetting should remain open to negotiation with those who were left behind.
When we walk through Esch, we do not search for the past out of nostalgia. We search for the places where another future almost happened. We recognize buildings that no longer exist, streets that changed their names, factories that still echo with voices no official archive remembers. We see the city not only as it is, but as it continues to unfold through unrealized possibilities.
You call these absences.
We call them citizens.
A city that only preserves monuments to its successes eventually forgets how to change. A city that allows only one story to be told becomes incapable of imagining another one. The portal between Esch and Ash is not simply a passage between two places. It is an agreement that history is never complete, that exclusion is never final, and that every city owes something to the lives and futures it has left behind.
We are not asking Esch to become Ash.
We ask only that neither city be forced to exist without the other.
Keep the crossings open. Establish places where forgotten histories, displaced communities, abandoned ideas, and impossible futures can return—not as museum pieces or commemorations, but as participants in the ongoing life of the city. Let planning include uncertainty. Let memory remain unfinished. Accept that a city is healthiest when it continues to negotiate with its own margins.
If the portal closes, Ash will survive without you.
But Esch will gradually lose the ability to recognize itself.
A city that can no longer meet its own excluded possibilities will eventually mistake certainty for stability and completion for progress.
Leave the portal open.
Not for us alone.
For the city that Esch has not yet become.