Fallen Races (I-II)

Where nature is frailer than could science accommodate

Prologue

607. I am told our father took the city.

612. That we were born under his military rule. And that my brother still remembers it.

619. That when those orders arrived from Gala that our occupation of Geheem was to come to an end, and a new bureaucratic elite rose to replace us, my brother and I were brought back to Aestrea at the ages of seven and three.

620. That in Aestrea we were given the Dalian names Sono and Fardo. And that our father was received a conqueror returned. Laurels placed on his head by those Reckoners who had not yet exhausted their patience for foreign histories.

626. And when our father died, he left me a pocketwatch that ticks only for me.

634. As I reach the age of eight-and-ten, Sono decides the time is come to see again the place of our birth. Behind us marches in patient step the whole entourage of his house, bearing the instruments of two sciences.

See Glossary here

[After the trains run no longer, the party continues on horseback to the city of Miden, where they contemplate the aftermath of the revolution that expelled the Galatian Empire. From this point onward, a woman giant guides their way into the deeper Heem, where the architecture of older colonizers is still found. By Sonos side rides his wife Dalia, and sharing his saddle is the elder child Annette. Sono forbids his childs heeding of the giant, as even her attempts at the high tongue are spoiled by the mist of an accent.]

The Heem brought our trains to a halt; soon our compasses will reverse. Cross an abandoned steamshovel, you see clogged culverts under the bridges. Animals pass over hauling off wagonways. Next stops my Pomean pocketwatch, then the lodestones are dead. Squibrounds in the gunbarrels. Pause. Here the rivers do not flow as on the maps. We are come to a land where blood has told. Rumor has it, memory does not serve. And, above, stranger stars already mock the quadrants we brought from Aestrea. Our masked servants reach the city emptyhanded and leave miles along a track of discarded tools.

Two days we were hosted by some usurper prince in his palace. Slept in projects of Galatian chambers. The never-finished ceilings as an accidental atrium after their departure. The natives have not removed the paintings that now look like distant visitors on the walls. Midgets in queer finery where half-raised towers stand monuments of postcolonial inertia. Spiral fluted columns chaotic all about. On generous steles were carved some names also of their illiterate people. And, after its brief elevation to a metropolis, now feral mares have started again to move their mobs of unbroken foals around the city like armies of the past let loose.

On the third day she arrived. The low nobility clapped at her greatness. My brother beheld the guide he had summoned. And then we left.

Now I watch her silent. How she lets the lantern sway behind the fog. Ponds lurk underneath veils of green to corrode my boots, to make me stumble. Yet the creature is barefoot. Drops leak back from the black hoof as she hefts it from the dirt and fords on brambles and pads. The woman is lean and taller than men. She has no name the child could utter, but wrinkles on the pale, some teeth worn dull, and the trailing curtains of white hair waving cross the hunchback and drinking the color of the soil. Wising the way mid a bonecane, she chants in her rain tongue between grainy hisses and glottal stops and come shivers now. You hear it grit against her tract.

On horseback, Sono guards his daughters ears against the giants dialect. His hands twined in the long black hair that drapes Annettes shoulder as an epaulette of the Dalian race. They wear double-filters, and more canisters chime from inside the panniers, and jostle to the march of the animals. On their path, a few last prides of Pomean architecture will emerge past the failed city of Miden. Tufa columns rise from the lakes. The second remains are empty. Unlit lighthouses, starwatches. Case the child keep looking at the giant, the father might as well cover her eyes.

When a man marries above him, his children ought also be above him. He says.

II.

[As they leave the outskirts of Miden, structures on the horizon mark the transition to the deeper Heem, where the Pomean Empire rose and fell long before Galatian expansion. Dalia tells Fardo about the history of the land he was born in yet does not know.]

And next them rides Dalia, after whom Annette strains the upturn of her nose and the sharp features of the capital. She bears a mask covering save the eyes. You can see her frail figure as a proud skeleton under the robe, sidesaddling and lefthand to the rein. And posing above a stallion that flaunts bothsides the golden-tyrian of her father. Light fabrics swinging from the muscular torso where you can make out armillas and abaci on the achievement. Then Crests of beasts. Folding symbols of those Aestrean and Galatian elites that decades long had migrated to Dalianize the periphery of the late empire and later, in their hasty flight from Miden, would behead their mongrel king and set their ports aflame. Then I hear the clopping brought to a halt. The animal snort. She hands me a filtermask that I will not wear.

She says to me this land is made for our peoples coming, to which you half belong.

She says crossing the watchtowers of Miden every mile will reveal more ruined wonders. And that I shall neither be impressed by them nor feel they are befallen to me somehow. For where nature is frailer than could science accommodate, and knowledge is instead inherited from previous, more gifted races, we are to enter the realms of antiquarian kings, their courts of archeologists and translators.

As we pass the first colossus in the distance, she tells me how all philosophies of Wellev are ways of addressing the questions of what knowledge is and why it was lost. She names the great decline, when the Pomos Empire fell; and the relics left behind by it. How, during the fog era, when the sky was covered in sheets of vapor, wars were fought for the last dusty gears of broken machinery. And then of a dim era, when armies and crowns were traded for spyglasses; and of the Heemen and Fresean kings that sacked our Dalian lands, their hexes and blenders who burned on accident kingdoms entire.

And then goes on about her own father. His earnest belief the subjects of his house would assimilate, and his curiosity for the treasures of the Heem. The hope that, at least in the city of Miden, where no great urban society had preceded our oncoming, the tribes would make devout students of Gala. Yet the natives have decided against our presents. And, with no interest from the capital in supporting a military incursion in a place the Pomos had not touched, the empire had to recollect its arms and abandon the city. Two decades later, take a look around. We reenter plazas of rue. Unvisited tombs and their names unreadable on the slab. Neighborhoods given to population decline. Therein rest the few elderly of Miden. They flock together around the river and take one or two moments to recall their words. Beyond them labors a mute generation, who have only known the grammar of the empire. And in the schools still running, noble children are memorizing verses in their own genderless dialect, which they now recite only with improper pauses, flaws of aspiration. Our sole legacy is this sad ersatz of their culture. In any case, nothing is here anymore.

And in my turn I say, whether by merit or luck, this land holds further secrets than our reckoners could account for. That there must be some philosophies we have not yet found. That I am eager to see Geheem for what shall strike me as a first time. And, even if by mere curiosity, a boy must be moved to know whence he comes.

But to that she laughs and warns where the Ederos flow crosses and delivers before the sister capitals of Geheem and Genist banquets of his fruits and flowers for all seasons; there, though nature has delivered on her promises, history has not. It has merely spared the fens from the wars that preceded and devastated the fog era. And, though many scholars have made their hopeful way to this land, it is we, who were tasked with civilizing it, that first understood there is no philosophy of the Heem. And that all proper philosophies will result always the same, for there is one sole philosophy, for Galatians and for all peoples. And if the Pomos had any lores or methods, they must not have contradicted our reckonings, but complemented them. And are now lost among the Heemen. And so you ought not forget there are no ideas here so exotic they could not be equally well or better expressed in the capital.

What I hear and whence I conclude and pronounce if this is true, then the Aestreans have conjured up the sole corpus of knowledge on the whole of Wellev. On which one can say they truly are the better stock of the rain era.

To which Dalia, cocking her head until the golden earrings from her left lobe land fore her cheek, with most affected Galatian tone and cadence, perhaps sardonic and side Aestrean gestures so replies:

Oh, on that matter I have changed my mind. No, and this may be a courageous opinion of mine, but I now believe it was a mere accident that all universal discoveries since the decline were reckoned out in Aestrea and not, for example, in this locality. It might well be that we were flat lucky.

After which her stallion passes by, and it rains on.