The river is gone.
It didn't dry up over years, through overuse and changing weather. In a single day, the river deltas turned to cracking mud flats.
It sprang, unbeknownst to you, from a crack in a pipeline a mile wide and a hundred thousand miles long. After however many years, the humming mind of the world had the hole sealed.
That humming mind didn't know you were there. It still doesn't.
And yet, it is killing you nonetheless.
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| huleeb the ground, the walls, the ceilings, they are all nests of wires and pipelines a transit hub for raw materials |
"You", in this case, is Cell Cesme - a village of Sustainers. 100 people lived here, growing papyrus and fishing from rafts. Another 300 slept, and dreamed the world into existence. You have to leave - and you can leave no one behind. Even if you have to drag all three hundred sleepers behind you with rollers and chains (and you will), if you leave them behind you are Sustainers no longer.
Your leadership is divided. The twin priest-storytellers, Sevket and Coskun, draw and redraw routes. There is no way out except through the territories of your rivals. Diplomacy or violence - almost assuredly the latter, as you drag your herds through their dying lands.
Well. They aren't your herds. The vast majority are Yasar Herdsman's (thus the name, I suppose). The crisis will soon bring the erasure of debts - so Yasar waits for their chance to build a new, near-unilateral debt network, one where everyone owes them, and they owe no one. Of course, players grab for their spears at the slightest sign of autocracy - but will they really take time in an emergency to resist Yasar, destabilize the Cell, possibly cost them their best negotiator (which, make no mistake, Yasar is), and lose access to Yasar's near-constant gifts of treasure and livestock? They are no tyrant, they are not cruel, and they are useful.
Cesme's march goes on and on, through miles of dangling wires. Through biting wind, through sideways rains of melted plastic, through rotten floors and crumbling footholds.
Your nearest neighbor is Cell Rakam. They are impatient, riotous, lovers of pottery, worse herders and better hunters. They keep a shrine in the middle of their Cell, around what they say is the footprint of an immortal, burned into solid steel. You have been rivals for years, squabbling over a pipeline of clear sugar syrup.
They keep a champion, Fevziye Bladesmith. They are three hundred and twenty seven years old. They have spent every year of it fighting. Their spear is a solid bar of some odd metal that splinters to a sharp point, leaving flakes that glow white-hot in the air.
Cutting across your path is a perfectly square tunnel. In each corner an electromagnet hums - and, from time to time, a house-sized steel cube passes through the maglev path. At hundreds of miles an hour. Without warning.
Now you are through, to Cell Kaynasmak, behind their veil of raining splinters. Caravan travelers, and good friends to Cell Düzenli, up in the plains. A massive hollow cylinder hangs down from their ceiling - to speak to Düzenli, they ring it with hammers like a bell. The response from Düzenli is fragmented; awful tales of replication, of worm-cavalry, of burnt homes and refugees.
They have picked up a Düzenli variation to their religion - the idea that the mind leaves traces of itself in the body, and that your "past lives" can be resummoned.
One of their scavengers, Gokce, has been bilocated, uninentionally. They left to go... somewhere, months ago, and never returned. The Kaynasmakites deemed them dead and pulled their backup out of the dream. Replication is taboo - one Gokce will be expected to return to sleep, or to die. Neither of them wish to.
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| huleeb |
Liquid screens well up from the tangle of wires you walk on. They pool around your feet, as if pawing at your ankles for attention. The picture within them is alive. [missing referent], a sapient-adaptive infohazard complex. Look into the screen and you will see it - then look away, and it will not leave you. A negative-space figure, a hole in a twisting, crackling background.
It wants to head north - there is a labyrinth of black glass, where it believes it can return to the wires where it belongs. The outside world is so cold, and so small. For a point of Wisdom (permanently) and a cherished memory, you can insert [missing referent] into your speech, and make demands of it.
If you do not carry it to its destination, it will take these memories on its own.
Then, finally, Cell Uzakta, cell of wind chimes and mason's guilds. But by the time you reach them, they will be Uzakta no longer. The sleepers will hum agonizing (not agonized - they are so very calm, and so very quiet) tones, and the wakeful will watch you from behind black glass masks. People came from above - from where you head. They knew there was no water. They offered it, in exchange for work. And eventually, Cell Uzakta broke.
Now, it is The Garden Where Nothing Is Bitter. A farming outpost for the Firstborn above, in the ventilation plains. There was a grove of carbon fiber towers, carved into perfect shapes. They fell, they must be replaced, but the cities of the plain delay work. Cause losses. The Firstborn needed a beachhead, and a labor source. In the midst of the Garden is an elevator - built in a day to move grain and soldiers.
You might have had cousins in Uzakta. They will not recognize you.
On the way there, you may meet Ipek and Batuhan - Scavengers, both, sent to see if the river is truly gone. There has to be an alternative. But by the time they return, Uzakta has already made their deal. Ipek is pious, jocular, pitying. Batuhan is silent.
But even the Firstborn are not free from threat. They are here to support the Host Parallel in the plains - but the Host is an artillery/cavalry regiment, optimized to cut down Oasis city levies in an open field. Here, their railgun rounds clatter into walls, and their spring-cavalry are lost in mazes of tunnels. There are still so many opportunities for something to go wrong.
An envoy of theirs, Gift of the Generous World, wanders the random encounter table wrapped in 3D-printed fabric, heralded by a screaming ball of iridescent plasma, and guarded by a magnesium-framed thing in the shape of a nervous system.
Past the Garden is the Door. Six feet of steel between you and the plains. It has been open for so long that you forgot it could close.
But it did.
