What Is Underneath

There is no collapse. That is the thing about it.

A collapse would have a date, and survivors who agreed on where they were when it happened. What Luxemburg gets instead is three hundred years of things working slightly less well than they did, until one day the word for what people are living in has quietly changed.

Nobody is at fault by then. Everyone who decided anything is dead.

The roads go first, which is fitting, because the roads were first.

Maintenance stops being worth what it costs. A line closes because the town at one end of it has too few people to justify the run, and then the town at the other end has fewer people because the line closed. Luxemburg was built on a trade route and it comes apart the same way, one connection at a time, in the direction the goods used to travel.

The ground is worse than it was, in ways the records do not connect to anything, because the people keeping the records were not told either.

Institutions dissolve without being abolished. They simply stop being obeyed, and then stop meeting, and then the building is used for something else.

What replaces them is small and local and works: a few hundred people around a thing that still functions. A well, a mill, a stretch of rail somebody keeps clear by hand. Ambition is not defeated in these centuries. It is just no longer the useful trait, and the people who have it are outnumbered by people who can fix a pump.

Children are born who have never seen a nation and do not feel the absence of one.

By about 2300 it is stable enough that it has a name, and the name is Lichdenstein.

It is not a country. It is a handful of settlements that trade and mostly get on: New Cliffhanger, which tries to keep a balance with the land and which everyone defers to without ever voting on it; Floodhaven in its canyon; Fumble out west, mining and tinkering; Gon Long Island on its canals.

They are, by the standards of everything in the last thousand years, decent. They build small. They take less than they could.

They have built it on top of him.

All five shares are in that ground. So is what is left of Severin Falkenrath, who spent six hundred years working toward exactly the arrangement that is now under their fields, and got it, and cannot do anything with it.

Nobody in Lichdenstein knows. There is no reason they would. The Avari were a children’s story a thousand years ago and are not even that now, the Ravana Ruins are unrecorded and unvisited, and the Curse of Ravana has no name here because nothing here has needed one.

The people farming it are the descendants of everyone who survived what he did to get it there.