The Fall

By the 1340s Elias Castillon is asking them to stop.

He is the only one who does. He has held a share for sixty years, watched what it has made of the other four, and arrived at the obvious conclusion. He argues it with his father, who is the one person who might listen to him. His father does not.

In 1359 Leopold von Lachsenhausen and Victor von Lachsenhausen stop arguing with anyone and withdraw to Mount Kings, the house King Aldric of Lachsenhausen built and did not live to grow old in. Two of the five have taken themselves out of it.

Which leaves them in one place, together, apart from everyone, in a house on a cliff.

In 1361 Severin Falkenrath comes to Mount Kings to rekindle trust, and is made welcome. He has been preparing this since 1282.

He poisons the wine. Leopold von Lachsenhausen and Victor von Lachsenhausen drink it. Whatever the brothers understand in the time left to them is not recorded, and there is nobody in the room who would have recorded it.

Then he waits. He does not need to touch them.

Two shares cross the room. He is carrying three.

Their bodies go over the cliffs, and the mountain cracks where they land. Shattered rock is the grave they get, and it is still their grave.

At three shares the decline is severe and it is no longer easy to pass as fully human. He has read the ruins. He knows what four will cost him and he has four killings to arrange, and he has already been immortal for seventy-nine years. There is no hurry in this. There was never any hurry.

The villages find out.

Not the plan. Nobody outside the five knows the plan, and one of the five does not know it either. What they find out is that two of the four immortals who have ruled them for seventy-eight years are dead, and that the manner of it was wine.

The revolt of 1362 is not a war. Reverence and fear were the whole structure, and both required The Avari to be beyond dying. Two of them have just demonstrably died.

Bellum Castle has tunnels. How far they run is not written down anywhere.

Two men go into the tunnels under Bellum Castle. One comes out.

They met here. In 1233, in this castle, a scarred young man and a young man cast out of a merchant family found each other and began what became The Avari. A hundred and twenty-nine years later they are underground in the same building with a revolt overhead.

Severin Falkenrath stabs Lucien Alvaro de Castillon.

Four.

The architect of the empire dies in the foundations of the first thing he built, and the mountain hollows itself out beneath the castle around him. The record does not say whether he understood it in the moment, or had understood it for years and preferred the empire anyway.

Elias Castillon runs.

He has always been the incidental one. Included at the Ravana Ruins in 1282 at thirty-three because he was Lucien’s son, not because he was anything to The Avari. Arguing since the 1340s for an end nobody wanted.

He goes to the Vulcan Islands, far to the southeast, largely unknown to the mainland. It is the best hiding place available to him. It is not good enough, and he may know that when he chooses it.

Three years pass.

In 1365 Severin Falkenrath finds the islands.

Four shares, held for eighty-three years. At four the decline is catastrophic. Six hundred more years of it will leave nothing recognisably human in the appearance of him, but that is later. What comes up the cliff toward Elias Castillon is already not quite a man, and is entirely certain it is about to be finished.

He needs to be the one who does it.

Elias does not let him be.

He goes off the Seaborrow Cliffs.

The fall kills him, so the island takes the share. The ground is not built for what lands on it either: the fissure tears open into the Castillon Rift, and the same convulsion heaves Chunk Err out of the sea to the west.

Severin Falkenrath arrives too late. That is the whole of what the record says about him at that moment.

The fifth share is not lost. It is entrenched, threaded into the foundations of the islands, and every attempt to take it over the next six centuries will damage the world a little more. The last attempt will pull him down instead. He will go into the earth and stay.

Nine hundred and thirty-five years from this cliff, Lichdenstein will be settled on ground that holds all five shares and the man who wanted them.

Nobody alive ever finds out what Elias Castillon did.