30th

And most disruptive of all, relationships were sundered. Lovers were divided, fathers, mothers, and sons split up, friendships of a lifetime broken. It was almost always men who made the journey, though some families had been known to take the chance. In those rare cases, it was to take on an existing farm or ranch or perhaps a hostelry, something that had a place for everyone. But there were few of these, even fewer than the families who were willing to take the chance.
Moving to Helle or just leaving the protections of the city for an existence on the plain was an option open to some but ostracism was imminent if one so much as mentioned it. It was considered an insult or worse an offense against the state to want to leave for another city. There may have been a time when people could take ship for a new opportunity, just as New Destiny itself was founded, but that required knowledge that was long forgotten. There were no ships, nor any sailors. There were small fishing boats but their crews rarely left sight of land. The horizon marked a line no one dared cross nor even approach. Even the limited journeys between the cities were made overland, rather than risk the unknown seas.
By the same token, anyone who moved to New Destiny was considered an outsider for quite some time, often for their whole time there. Helle was less insular and people were taken as they came. Where in New Destiny, one’s provenance was mentioned upon introduction, in Helle no one cared. Once you were in Helle, no one cared where you came from.
New Destiny may have been founded by people in search of opportunities, willing to try new ideas and philosophies but those ideas had died out among the present inhabitants. Everything was recycled and reused, from the ideals and ethics, to the building materials. The city had laws on its books that proscribed activities that no one could remember anyone doing, but they were published and proclaimed year in, year out. Some laws barred things like the sale of intoxicating substances before midday, but while they had not been enforced in living memory, they were still included in the civil code.
The city itself was made of recycled materials. The pits from which all the stone had been dug were closed and forgotten. The brick-works were long shuttered. Glasswork was a mystery. But as buildings were pulled down, every scrap of material was reclaimed, sold or scavenged, and re-used by a new structure that in most cases bore no resemblance to the old one. A tall narrow merchant’s house with ornate brickwork and trim would be pulled down, have it’s constituent parts cataloged, commingled with some others, and a squat, asymmetrical utility building would be birthed from the accumulated odds and ends. Many of the new buildings were triumphs of balance and leverage, as they used no masonry or other materials to hold the stone or brick together. Wood frames were held together with mortise and tenon or often with ropes and strapping until they could be surrounded by the heavy skin that would weigh it all down.
Figures that had once graced the tops of towers now decorated doorways and foyers in the better parts of town. The bones of old warehouses, fragrant with coffee, tobacco, and spices, were used in the more diverse quarters, where people didn’t stay in one place long and newcomers were discouraged from striking up conversations unless they had business to transact or money to pay. Window glass was rare enough to be a form of currency, one that increased in value as its supply shrank.
The most rare commodity was energy beyond human motive power. The things the creators had come to rely on, stone, brick, glass, metals, were all made available through some kind of fuel to run machines they had invented, refined, and perfected. These had run on solid fuels dug from the ground, from fluids from under the ground, and the machines had made the cities bright, safe, and full of promise.
The fuels had run out so long ago, no one had ever seen anything that used them actually work. There were stories of carriages that carried almost 100 people through streets as swiftly as a bicycle could carry one, of smaller ones that carried one or two people, or others that flew. There were rumored to be examples of these last decaying in the sun far past the furthest outposts in the New Lands, but no one could verify this.
So the kind of building and voyaging that the storied founders had been capable of was the stuff of dreams now. No one imagined a return to those days, and only a few gave any thought to the idea of what might happen there were no more materials to reuse, when every single thing they had been left with was broken. What would they do then? What could they do?
The wars that the Bone Kingdom thought were due to resume at any moment dated back to when the life people had known began to change. The fuels and resulting power were not always used for buildings and trade with distant lands. Some of the machines were engines of war, squat, ugly rams for breaking into siege walls, engine-powered catapults. Sometimes the liquids themselves were used as weapons to visit fire on the defenders.
Those were terrible days. There were many who disagreed with the use of these wonders for anything but peaceful purposes but they were ignored by those who were able to couch their arguments in terms of progress, growth, and prosperity. The end of that age had marked an end to intercity violence. The power to destroy had driven people to use it, to act on wishes they would never have formed without it. And now that power’s beneficial uses were a distant memory. It was a recurring theme in some circles to bemoan the fact that everything was so much better in the days when the power to do great things had been in the hands of so many. But no sooner was that wish expressed than all were reminded of how it had been misused.
In the oldest part of town, not far from the Founders’ Monument, was the bombed-out wreck of an old building. No one knew now what it was, if it had been a house or a place of worship, but it had been left unrepaired as a reminder of those terrible days. In fact, it was a utility building associated with the sewage lines and had blown up from a poorly vented gas buildup and an inopportune smoke break, but that was a tragedy in a sense. The building, regardless of its origins or intent, was a potent reminder of power unleashed in ways best left alone.
The people of the Bone Kingdom had suffered less in some ways when the people of New Destiny had found their lifestyle sinking back to a simpler time. For their part, they had never left it. The Kingdom had never embraced the breakthroughs of the machine age and it’s world-changing power. Its warrior culture regarded the use of machines to fight or till one’s fields or carry loads as a sign of weakness. The machines offered no improvement in the work performed, merely an increase in its quantity and its rulers saw no value in that. What would people do with less work to do? How did that benefit the Kingdom?
There had been trade with the other cities, facilitated by powered transport that could get around faster than draft animals. But with the decline of power-driven vehicles had come a decline in trade. It seemed the trade was no longer worthwhile if it had to be done with draft animals or carried by men. So the Bone Kingdom became more isolated and nursed it’s ancient grudges as it looked to its skeletal leaders for guidance.
Helle’s civic life had been impacted by the hardship of going back to a earlier time, but it had simply repurposed the paved roads and parking areas as public walking areas and it’s new market places. There had been some who agitated for these changes even before it became possible, who raged against the tyranny of powered transport as unnatural, dangerous, and in contempt of civic life. Most now agreed with them, as often happens when no other option exists. Few missed the old days of impersonal travel and proxy arguments, enacted with steel machines on crowded streets. Helle had long been a more open city, planned to keep buildings at a human scale and with a lot of open space at street level and this paid unforeseen dividends when the new age dawned and human scale once again became the yardstick. New Destiny was not built with people in mind so much as striving for heroic scale and proportion everywhere. People walked the streets and looked at the figures that had once adorned buildings and wonder why their makers had insisted on making them half again as large as regular people.