I think Cat Rambo's becoming one of those authors that appears everywhere but doesn't really appeal to me. This story was TOO light, didn't dig far enough into the mythology of the world. There were some great bits near the end (the nothingness sky, the flowers kept alive from sorcery), but the whole 5000-year-old stalled culture motif doesn't -- pardon the expression -- move the story. And the climax, with the city collapsing because someone changed... that didn't do it for me. There wasn't enough to make me care that the city was being destroyed.
I would've liked to know more about the culture of this world... the names suggested Middle East or Indian/West Asian but in those cultures, IIRC, isn't prearranged marriage the norm, not love? And why did this rat, after 5000 years, decide to be the first to approach Zulaika? Are the rats immortal too, or is this rat only a few years old? How does this rat differ from all other rats? Why do rats have run of the city? There were just too many unanswered questions.
It took Rachel a little while to get into the flow of the reading, but she had it by about halfway through, which made it all the more jarring when the story just... ended.
Can we please have a Cat Rambo moratorium for a couple of months across all three casts? Just to cleanse the palate? I like cake, but if I eat it every day, or eat too much of it, I start to feel blah. And, for the most part, I don't like Cat Rambo's stories nearly as much as I like cake.
...and I hate to be an intro-basher, but this one didn't really connect for me... I think it would've worked better as an outro, when we'd established that the story had rats in it.