ASHBAT

Adelma is a city that appears ordinary and orderly on the surface, yet when one looks into the faces of its inhabitants, the silhouettes of deceased loved ones are reflected back. This unsettling familiarity renders the city both recognizable and deeply estranged, as memory and presence become entangled. While Adelma maintains a rigid and static spatial order, its inhabitants are no longer fully human; they have transformed into beings shaped by the absence of the emotions that once defined them. Each night, Ashbat emerges from the underground city beneath Adelma. Winged and shadow-like, Ashbat moves silently through the urban fabric, absorbing from the inhabitants the full spectrum of emotions that make one human—joy, sorrow, fear, desire, and longing. These emotions pass through Ashbat’s body, becoming a raw emotional essence that is carried into the multilayered subterranean city. By extracting not only positive emotions but the entirety of emotional experience, Ashbat allows the surface beings to settle into their altered and authentic forms. The underground city functions as a vast emotional archive organized into three primary zones. Within these zones, emotions collected from the surface are filtered, stratified according to their intensity, and gradually stabilized over time. Emotions that can be retained are preserved as fragments of memory, while excessive and destabilizing residues are separated from the system. At the deepest level lies a dark void into which Ashbat releases the most destructive emotions—guilt, envy, resentment, and hatred—preventing them from resurfacing and disrupting Adelma’s fragile balance. Shaped by Ashbat’s cyclical movement, this underground architecture operates not merely as infrastructure but as a living system that preserves the city’s emotional memory. The fragile order of Adelma’s surface endures only through this invisible and continuously functioning archive below. Ashbat exists neither as a villain nor a savior, but as the silent custodian of balance that allows the city to persist.