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mc776[no number or storyline given - can be placed after just about any initial in media res scene.]
It wasn't always like this. Long ago the Empire brought prosperity, stability and infrastructure to these lands, trade was booming and the great Sun-Sea was not the onerous barrier it is today. Until about eighty years ago you could make twenty inter-continental trips and never once feel the sea was there, a mere illusion of vastness upon the horizon caused by the sharp curvature of our small world.
For over a hundred years the teleports connected seven cities in the north to seven cities in the south. Not the sort we have now, not some swirling round gate in a pretty stone shrine on a hill barely big enough for a grown man to step through - no, the Empire was bigger then. They had to set them out on the water, there wasn't anywhere in the cities themselves with so much space; that this meant only expanding existing port cities already used to this sort of thing was just a convenience. Yachts, ferries, barges little more than vast floating boxes of goods, silks, slaves and spices from the south, metals and machines and golems from the north, sorcerous charms from the far southern swamps of Sauressche, precious lithium and long planks from the towering cedars of Kolodos in the barbarian far north, art and media and priceless treasures and exotic beasts and celebrated personalities from every part of the earth, all came and went by the dozens each day. Think big open fields of wine-dark sea, surrounded by signal lights and walls of control towers, millions of days' wages flowing into and through these gates to the biggest - and shortest - major shipping routes mankind had ever seen.
We should have all seen it coming. Looking back it's surprising how long it took, all things considered, before it finally occurred to someone to try to break this thing. The Empire was big and proud, had shot itself far and wide and earned itself a lot more enemies than it ever wanted its people to know.
So it happened one foggy autumn morning at the port of Razval, that old fortress city even now the shining jewel of the old Empire's southernmost peninsula, where stood the very first great teleport ever built, that a scheduled four great barges, eight ferries and three private yachts, just under four thousand souls and about fifty thousand denarii in goods, vessels and equipment all told, simply never arrived.
The panic went on for weeks. Only the Razval/Idrepholon gate was ever fully closed, however, and even then only for a few days: those in charge rightly conceded under public pressure that the trade routes were too big to shut down on account of a single failure.
In the following months of outrage, denial, plummeting stocks and political blame-gaming in the old Empire certain rebel factions in the far south, long known enemies of Imperial expansion and economic dominance, decided they'd own up to the missing fleet. The Empire's response was swift, brutal, and calculating, and set the tone for what would become a thirty-year war that would twice bankrupt the Imperial government and tear the southern continent to pieces.
Athara poured more money and men into controlling her southern territories by force than she ever did through trade and the teleports; and for what gain? Her once great sagging purse of the treasury now trailed a torrent of gold from an ever widening hole; security forces at the ports slowly began to overtake the numbers of people going through them; the people of the old Empire, the north Empire, still largely sheltered from the riots and massacres of the south, were getting hungrier and angrier and more crowded with those lucky huddled masses of refugees that every so often esaped the enveloping security of the ports. Every time a politician found someone to blame who wasn't themselves, usually the angriest people who got hit hardest by the latest helping of chaos from any given direction, they opened up a new prison for them; and every time it inevitably failed to solve the problem, the people just got angrier and more police had to be hired to keep even the most loyal parts of the Empire under control.
Beneath all this, largely forgotten, lurked the original problem with the teleports. Go back to the few port archives the censors didn't bother with, and you'll see plenty of odd reports of bizarre murders, often preceded by strange lights from the unmanned control towers; random people coming in through the teleports, sometimes isolated, sometimes in groups, sometimes everyone in one boat and only that boat, who just stand around glassy-eyed, babbling unholy obscenities and trying to bludgeon the port staff with anything they could find the moment they noticed they were talking to them; every so often an entire set of people under routine quarantine would catch "port bug" and riot with lethal results. A few reports have some of these people randomly explode in the middle of the night, as staff would have to hose down the cell in the morning after subduing whoever else was left in there. It's hard to find a pattern to the reports, so many were burned or kept in Athara's palace archives under seal, while others were likely exaggerations or fabrications by security to justify a violent suppression of people with actual grievances; but looking back what little I've read I feel sure the actual numbers of people catching the port bug were getting bigger - and the bug itself becoming more obvious and violent - as time wore on.
About a year after its disappearance the original lost fleet showed up at Razval.
The mortal remains of the missing passengers and crew promptly stormed the docks and the control towers and ate the staff and soldiers posted there. Fifteen Imperial marines were killed trying to secure the harbour and then the smaller ships and control towers, before finally taking the barges after a week's siege; what they found in those crates, before their commanding officer sent a distress call urging any nearby destroyer to sink all four barges immediately and no there were no survivors yes please we checked no human survivors God damn it just sink the fucking barges NOW, was a secret every last one of them kept to the grave.
In the outrage that followed Athara knew that something had to be done. Mere control and enforcement were simply not enough; deterrence had to be a priority in this heightened climate of security; lives of Imperial citizens were at stake, and mere philosophies were a luxury not to be entertained by strong people in hard times. About a dozen miles south of the Razval teleport there stood a rock with an old lighthouse on it; in the year following the missing fleet's return, that lighthouse was refurbished, expanded and refitted into the most technologically advanced, epistemically refined and perfectly efficient prison of this period. To this day from Razval's harbour you can see the Tower of Ravens looming on the horizon, its spires and ribs sticking out like burrs in the distance, just enough to let the viewer guess where the latest tattered, tortured remnants of humanity were left dangling until the birds picked them apart, forever concealing whatever rape and mutilation befell the rebels and dissidents and foreigners who passed by the dozens each day through the Tower walls.
And so the war came and went, and many lost their lives and livelihoods, though a few made some respectable fortunes from the mess. Eventually it ended, largely because the money wasn't there anymore in one sense or the other, and life in the Empire must have returned to some sense of normal thereafter; but the old trade routes were long dead, the teleports dismantled or fallen into ruin, and the great port cities never again rose to their old glory.
When I was born there was no Empire in the southern continent. When I first took my Citizen examinations I thought nothing of the reports of Athara's first great expedition to reclaim it. When I first began my exile ten years later, my Citizenship subject to my undertaking never to return to Kolodos for the next ten years thereafter, bouncing around some odd jobs before settling as a secretary in a Razvalin law office, the whole expedition was still a faraway tidbit of fact that bore no relation to me or anyone I loved.
How would I have known, then, that the very people who swore that Citizens' oath on either side of me a lifetime ago would drag me right up to the heart of that sordid mess, and that I would have the utter lack of good sense to plunge the rest of the way in.
It wasn't always like this. Long ago the Empire brought prosperity, stability and infrastructure to these lands, trade was booming and the great Sun-Sea was not the onerous barrier it is today. Until about eighty years ago you could make twenty inter-continental trips and never once feel the sea was there, a mere illusion of vastness upon the horizon caused by the sharp curvature of our small world.
For over a hundred years the teleports connected seven cities in the north to seven cities in the south. Not the sort we have now, not some swirling round gate in a pretty stone shrine on a hill barely big enough for a grown man to step through - no, the Empire was bigger then. They had to set them out on the water, there wasn't anywhere in the cities themselves with so much space; that this meant only expanding existing port cities already used to this sort of thing was just a convenience. Yachts, ferries, barges little more than vast floating boxes of goods, silks, slaves and spices from the south, metals and machines and golems from the north, sorcerous charms from the far southern swamps of Sauressche, precious lithium and long planks from the towering cedars of Kolodos in the barbarian far north, art and media and priceless treasures and exotic beasts and celebrated personalities from every part of the earth, all came and went by the dozens each day. Think big open fields of wine-dark sea, surrounded by signal lights and walls of control towers, millions of days' wages flowing into and through these gates to the biggest - and shortest - major shipping routes mankind had ever seen.
We should have all seen it coming. Looking back it's surprising how long it took, all things considered, before it finally occurred to someone to try to break this thing. The Empire was big and proud, had shot itself far and wide and earned itself a lot more enemies than it ever wanted its people to know.
So it happened one foggy autumn morning at the port of Razval, that old fortress city even now the shining jewel of the old Empire's southernmost peninsula, where stood the very first great teleport ever built, that a scheduled four great barges, eight ferries and three private yachts, just under four thousand souls and about fifty thousand denarii in goods, vessels and equipment all told, simply never arrived.
The panic went on for weeks. Only the Razval/Idrepholon gate was ever fully closed, however, and even then only for a few days: those in charge rightly conceded under public pressure that the trade routes were too big to shut down on account of a single failure.
In the following months of outrage, denial, plummeting stocks and political blame-gaming in the old Empire certain rebel factions in the far south, long known enemies of Imperial expansion and economic dominance, decided they'd own up to the missing fleet. The Empire's response was swift, brutal, and calculating, and set the tone for what would become a thirty-year war that would twice bankrupt the Imperial government and tear the southern continent to pieces.
Athara poured more money and men into controlling her southern territories by force than she ever did through trade and the teleports; and for what gain? Her once great sagging purse of the treasury now trailed a torrent of gold from an ever widening hole; security forces at the ports slowly began to overtake the numbers of people going through them; the people of the old Empire, the north Empire, still largely sheltered from the riots and massacres of the south, were getting hungrier and angrier and more crowded with those lucky huddled masses of refugees that every so often esaped the enveloping security of the ports. Every time a politician found someone to blame who wasn't themselves, usually the angriest people who got hit hardest by the latest helping of chaos from any given direction, they opened up a new prison for them; and every time it inevitably failed to solve the problem, the people just got angrier and more police had to be hired to keep even the most loyal parts of the Empire under control.
Beneath all this, largely forgotten, lurked the original problem with the teleports. Go back to the few port archives the censors didn't bother with, and you'll see plenty of odd reports of bizarre murders, often preceded by strange lights from the unmanned control towers; random people coming in through the teleports, sometimes isolated, sometimes in groups, sometimes everyone in one boat and only that boat, who just stand around glassy-eyed, babbling unholy obscenities and trying to bludgeon the port staff with anything they could find the moment they noticed they were talking to them; every so often an entire set of people under routine quarantine would catch "port bug" and riot with lethal results. A few reports have some of these people randomly explode in the middle of the night, as staff would have to hose down the cell in the morning after subduing whoever else was left in there. It's hard to find a pattern to the reports, so many were burned or kept in Athara's palace archives under seal, while others were likely exaggerations or fabrications by security to justify a violent suppression of people with actual grievances; but looking back what little I've read I feel sure the actual numbers of people catching the port bug were getting bigger - and the bug itself becoming more obvious and violent - as time wore on.
About a year after its disappearance the original lost fleet showed up at Razval.
The mortal remains of the missing passengers and crew promptly stormed the docks and the control towers and ate the staff and soldiers posted there. Fifteen Imperial marines were killed trying to secure the harbour and then the smaller ships and control towers, before finally taking the barges after a week's siege; what they found in those crates, before their commanding officer sent a distress call urging any nearby destroyer to sink all four barges immediately and no there were no survivors yes please we checked no human survivors God damn it just sink the fucking barges NOW, was a secret every last one of them kept to the grave.
In the outrage that followed Athara knew that something had to be done. Mere control and enforcement were simply not enough; deterrence had to be a priority in this heightened climate of security; lives of Imperial citizens were at stake, and mere philosophies were a luxury not to be entertained by strong people in hard times. About a dozen miles south of the Razval teleport there stood a rock with an old lighthouse on it; in the year following the missing fleet's return, that lighthouse was refurbished, expanded and refitted into the most technologically advanced, epistemically refined and perfectly efficient prison of this period. To this day from Razval's harbour you can see the Tower of Ravens looming on the horizon, its spires and ribs sticking out like burrs in the distance, just enough to let the viewer guess where the latest tattered, tortured remnants of humanity were left dangling until the birds picked them apart, forever concealing whatever rape and mutilation befell the rebels and dissidents and foreigners who passed by the dozens each day through the Tower walls.
And so the war came and went, and many lost their lives and livelihoods, though a few made some respectable fortunes from the mess. Eventually it ended, largely because the money wasn't there anymore in one sense or the other, and life in the Empire must have returned to some sense of normal thereafter; but the old trade routes were long dead, the teleports dismantled or fallen into ruin, and the great port cities never again rose to their old glory.
When I was born there was no Empire in the southern continent. When I first took my Citizen examinations I thought nothing of the reports of Athara's first great expedition to reclaim it. When I first began my exile ten years later, my Citizenship subject to my undertaking never to return to Kolodos for the next ten years thereafter, bouncing around some odd jobs before settling as a secretary in a Razvalin law office, the whole expedition was still a faraway tidbit of fact that bore no relation to me or anyone I loved.
How would I have known, then, that the very people who swore that Citizens' oath on either side of me a lifetime ago would drag me right up to the heart of that sordid mess, and that I would have the utter lack of good sense to plunge the rest of the way in.