text: We were the last city left. It started many years ago. I was a distant cousin of the Emperor. As such, I had little experience of the court before I was sent to a minor school in one of the outlying provinces. They were a little odd there, and actually taught me - things. Things like how to think, how to plan, how to build and create and administer. My peers at the court would laugh at me when I visited; I had no idea of fashion, or courtly manners, or of the precise rituals of dance, or dining, or discourse. I hated it all, this disconnection from reality, this frivolousness disguised as sophistication. I cared as little for them as they for me, but I was of the Blooded so I was sent away, hidden in a mountainous corner where I could be forgotten. And so I came to Alaro. It was a small city then, peopled by artisans and miners. Forgotten in this supposedly crude backwater, I would send routine reports expressing my disillusionment. My actions were otherwise. My greatest advantages were all around me. Alaro was long a dumping ground for the ne’er-do-wells and odd thinkers who wanted to be away from the stifling centre of an over-traditional behemoth where their minds could wander down strange paths. It meant I could listen to artisans who had been expelled from guilds for original thinking, and judges who disliked corruption and had fallen afoul of some highborn who disliked their questions. We had priests who believed in piety rather than indulgences, and captains who believed in competency rather than connections and considered troublemakers, and philosophers who questioned the entire system but had entered internal exile in preference to a cup of traitorsbane or a silk rope. I spoke to them, and paid attention, and used them all to make my city clean and fair and strong. That was when the messengers came. The invaders had been with us for generations, a mess of warring tribes who raided us regularly, and had occasionally been united under a stronger chief than usual, before finding their reach exceeded their grasp and being scattered again. This new messiah-warlord seemed like all the rest, to be turned back like all the rest. But this time, he wasn’t, and we couldn’t. Years of complacency had allowed our defenses to weaken. We had always won, and so we always would. We were favoured by the Gods, and our priests had become corrupt and venal. Our walls were impenetrable, so they had been allowed to crumble. Our generals brilliant, our soldiers doughty, except they played politics in court, or dice in the barracks. And so, when he rose, we were worse than unprepared; we were overconfident. The first great battle was the worst military disaster the Empire had ever faced. The horde caught the cream of our troops in camp and carved them apart. The few survivors spoke of the enemy’s mercilessness. We were unworried. We retreated behind our walls where we would be safe to wait until the horde disintegrated. The walls weren’t enough. He had enlisted the talents of an exile, a genius who had railed against our complacency and been cast out for questioning our preparedness. The exile built engines we had never seen before, capable of smashing through our walls, allowing the horde in to rape and pillage. And so it was with the first city, Trevis, but it was small, and poor, and weak, so no matter. The others would stand. But then came the second, shining Barga, with its University, and the third, Halmore Tren, ancient towers burning like torches in the night. Other messengers came to Alaro, speaking of the fate of more each month as the horde ground onwards. Then came the Imperial Courier, and he spoke of the capital. Hammar, Great Hammar, city and fortress, teeming masses defended by six walls, some of the mightiest structures ever created by the Empire. The exile brought forth his engines, and each wall took but a day to fall. The courier spoke of incendiaries thrown immense distances, setting a firestorm that obliterated the first ring. She told us how the second was simply shattered, the horde hurtling through the breach to massacre the people who found their walls were not protection but a trap. The third was scaled, the fourth somehow undermined. The fifth fell to traitors who opened the gates. That left the sixth, the heart of Great Hammar, the Citadel of Temple and Throne. The exile used his greatest creation, a weapon of incomprehensible power, and destroyed the gatehouse with a single blow. The horde overran it all, the corpses uncountable, and at the heart of the wreck of the ruined Citadel, the heads of the Emperor and his court, lifted on long spikes so as to rule their realm of the dead. The horde continued. Surrenders were offered, and cities abandoned. Their peoples were subsumed into the horde, to follow as the lowest peons and keep up or die as their fate dictated - but not before being forced to raze their former homes to the ground. And so it was. Cities fought or gave in; all fell to the horde and to ruin. Our Gods abandoned us, our armies failed us, our former lords and masters supplanted by new fealties - starvation, desolation, desperation, and death. Finally, the horde came to us, Alaro of the Mountains. We had the last of the soldiers and citizens, the survivors, and the desperate. In that desperation, we found our rage. When they came for us, it was from behind a scattering of survivors, broken like shards of glass and struggling through the passes to reach us, terrified of what pursued them. The horde advanced without pretence. The dust could be seen for weeks, and the columns of smoke from burning farms and townships showed their inexorable progress. We had prepared. As they advanced, hidden pits opened beneath them. Raids drew off their cavalry and led them to fields of iron spikes. Ambushes from our bravest took a tithe of them, and rock falls and avalanches crushed and delayed them, buying us time, but never enough. And then they were here, before our walls, numberless, bestial, howling and stinking in the day and night, their camp fires a crude and smoking echo of the stars above. The exile started to prepare his engines, but we had our own great minds, and had prepared our own. Projectiles from our highest towers fell among the crews, slaughtering them. Swift sallies pushed back the attackers with brutal casualties on both sides, letting us burn and wreck before the same fate could befall us. Alas, for all our bravery and ingenuity, we could not get them all. The greatest of the exile’s weapons was made ready, and surrounded by the personal guard of the warlord. Its protection was impenetrable, and it was far out of range. We had still prepared, even for this. Our walls were anchored by mountains and we strove to repair and reinforce to resist as best we could. We held for days, back-filling rubble and bracing the cracks with beams and bars, but our towers fell, one by one, taking our engines with them. The wall was breached and ruined, reduced to rubble, and our fate was sealed. That was when he came forward. Survivors had told us of this, how the messiah-warlord would address the soon-to-be-dead, and now it was our turn. Surrounded by his inner circle of guards and priests and clan chiefs, he began to speak. He detailed his victories. He spoke at length of the fate of the rest of the empire, their death or submission. He informed us of our own fate with gruesome precision. He stated that he was destined to win, and we were doomed to oblivion. We clutched our weapons with sweating limbs, and knew it was all true. He finished as he always did, with the same words he always used. “I am the chosen, chosen to rule and destroy. My destiny is victory, and yours is death. May the gods strike me down if it is not so!” And then it came. From out of a clear sky came a blinding white light, furnace heat, and a sound so loud it was more than noise. We were cast from our feet, and all was dust and darkness. As it settled, we saw what remained. A crater, a massive pit, fully five hundred spans across, now yawned where the warlord-messiah and his guards and his priests and his khans had stood. The great engines were shattered, and so, it seemed, was the world. Behind our rubble barriers, we had somehow been spared; not so the horde. A great crack yawned where their east wing had once stood. An entire mountainside had fallen across those to the west. At the centre, though... Those furthest from the blast had merely been thrown down, but those closer were far worse. Some were burned beyond recognition, or rent apart, or broken, or smashed by stones, or simply lay without a mark, but still and dead. But we were not dead, and we still had our rage. We charged - sheer madness, it is true, but that didn’t matter at the time. We were still outnumbered beyond belief, but the horde’s belief was gone along with their messiah. They fled, and they never stopped. In their flight came our salvation. The camp followers, our former brethren, had been spared from the disaster and we took them in. Our mines had been stocked with supplies for a siege we never thought we would survive, and our wells and cisterns were brimming full and ready. We broke them open, and saved all who we could. From there, we spread outward and rebuilt, the Second Empire clawing its way up from the wrack and ruin of the first. We put the people at its heart, and we rose greater and fairer and better than before. I gained the name ‘Builder’, or ‘Blessed’, and eventually ‘Great’. Now Alaro of the Mountains is the greatest city of the second Empire, and at its heart stands the New Citadel, and at the centre, the Throne. The Throne is not comfortable, for it is made from a relic, the greatest relic of them all. Hauled from that great pit while still white-hot, it has been set into stone and placed at the centre of all we have built. It reminds us of our past, and how we almost failed. It speaks of how truly unpredictable the universe is, and how death may come from the wilderness or from a clear sky, and we must make ready and be strong. It carries strange symbols, some scorched and invisible, the remainder incomprehensible but distinct, and we will always wonder at their meaning.