The Long Pursuit

The empire does not fall. It comes apart, which takes longer and looks like less.

The Avari were four men and an arrangement, and with three of them dead the arrangement has nobody to be an arrangement between. Provinces stop reporting. Treaties Victor von Lachsenhausen signed are honoured by people who no longer remember why. By 1400 it is a collection of kingdoms again, which is what it was before, minus a century of nobody having to plan for a succession.

The other thing that happens in these years does not look like anything. The bond that held five shares together broke in 1365, and what came off it goes into the ground and stays.

Then two hundred years in which the most interesting thing is that nothing happens.

Kingdoms coalesce. The Avari become a story, and then a story people tell without believing, and then a word. Nobody alive has met one. The men who ruled without dying become the kind of thing a grandparent says to make a point about greed.

They are wrong about it in every particular except the greed, and there is one of them still walking around.

In 1622 a man founds a town to dig things out of the ground.

Frank Limestealer wants minerals and better machines for getting at them, and Limestealer is a mining and industrial research settlement with his name on it. He is a descendant of Ava Montclair, roughly twenty generations down, though nobody including him has any reason to know it.

He was born in 1602 and he dies in 1647, and they put up a statue. Forty-five years is an ordinary life of an ordinary length, and it is worth pausing on, because almost nothing else in this story is.

By 1701 it is one country again and it calls itself Luxemburg.

The capital goes up over the ruins of the old Avari stronghold, which is chosen for the reasons capitals are always chosen: the roads already go there. The Bellum Castle Trade Route is still the spine of the thing. Cliffhanger is still where the route first touched a town.

Every road in the new nation is a road four men laid for their own purposes, and the nation does not know that, and it does not matter that it does not know.

Then the machines arrive, and the appetite that built the first empire finds a bigger set of hands.

Railways go across Luxemburg through the late 18th and 19th centuries. Neutron NRG, Calcite Industries and Skank Industries lay competing lines. Towns that were a week apart become a day apart. It is, by any measure anyone is using, a success.

There are also places where nothing will grow. They are mapped, noted, worked around, and filed as geology. The word does a great deal of work for a very long time.

In 1933 a company is founded in Cliffhanger by a man called *S. Falken*.

Neutron NRG says it is in energy research and dominates the sector inside a decade. What it is actually doing is trying to get one specific thing out of the ground at the Vulcan Islands, and it has been trying since 1365, and this is simply the first century in which the attempt can be made with machinery and shareholders.

Falken is not seen much. He works through proxies. Five hundred and seventy years at four shares have left him something that cannot sit across a table from an investor.

Every attempt takes something out of the world, and it is never the thing they are reaching for.

The extraction damages the Vulcan Islands and then further out, because the fifth share is not in a place, it is threaded through the foundations. Pulling at it pulls at everything it is threaded through. Calcite Industries and Skank Industries try it too, with no idea what they are pulling at.

In 1994 Neutron NRG tries to fly on it. The aircraft comes down on the cliffs near Old Man’s Consequences, south of Okinowa, and the aeronautics programme is scrapped with the casualties.

The dead zones are still geology. The company knows better and is not saying.

In the 21st century he tries again, and the ground takes him.

The attempt reverses. Instead of the share coming up, Severin Falkenrath goes down, into the earth at the Vulcan Islands, where his four shares meet the one Elias Castillon put there in 1365.

All five are in the ground. He is with them. Nearly seven centuries after the cliff he is, in the only sense that ever mattered to him, holding all five.

Neutron NRG stops operating. Nobody announces anything.