114.1 - Visions of Alterna

For a moment, you see Alterna differently.

You see the streets paved with white brick, a veritable rainbow of colored stone laying out myriad paths through the expansive city, yellows, red, greens, and blues steering the crowds from destination to destination, each line indicating a different class of building, a different category of structure.

You see the living forest to the north of the central square, its leaves already bearing the purples and the reds of autumn. You watch as the trunks expand and contract, how the oldest bark creaks and crackles as the forest shifts with the wind, turning to capture the fading rays of the sun. You watch as one of the trees moves, so slowly it could be a trick of the light but it surely is not a trick of the light, how the tree moves closer to the rest of the grove.

You see the tracks, connecting Alterna to the rest of its territories. You watch one train, a silver serpent of fantastical engineering, start its journey out of the glass-ringed station, its gleaming cars connected to each other via violet lightning. You watch another enter the station, the lightning winking out as the winds shift the train’s cars onto separate tracks, sliding it up to multiple platforms.

You see a tower to the gods, both in grandeur and in height, casting itself into the sky. Twelve floors, one for each of Ducorde’s pantheon, praised at the height of their powers. A couple dances to Somnus’s forlorn tune. Turon’s murals throw their colors to the wind, sparks of brilliance emanating from their floor. Above it all the thirteenth floor sits, its maker a mystery, its presence undeniable, its purpose lost when this ancient kingdom fell.

You see a center of learning, a university and a laboratory, rings of classrooms around geysers of molten metal and boiling thunderclouds. You see the realm’s finest minds hard at work, weaving magics that contort time and reverse entropy. You see portals slice themselves open inside concentric circles, admitting passage from beings of pure mathematical reason, a parallel world of static and decay.

You see a museum to the history of this great empire, an arch over a triumph of nationalism. Treasures the Empire over, returned home to those who conquered, colonized, and constructed in the aftermath. Promises of fine art and exotic histories await within its alabaster walls and behind its titanic stone columns.

You see a hovering ziggurat, lush with flowering vines and singing birds. Water pours without end from it to the city below, into grooves carved into the stones and the streets, carrying the sparkling rivers all throughout the jewel of the empire.



And then it is gone.



You see the fractured streets, devoid of color, devoid of life, devoid of consistency.

You see the overgrown forest, gray and grave, unchecked growth leading to choked greenery.

You see the tracks, maintained for purposes unclear, connecting to parts unknown, a new building constructed of drab brick and wrought iron inside of the shattered frame of the glass enclosure.

You see the the wreckage of the tower, countless floors lost to the raging sea below.

You see the lifeless body of the university, its halls stripped empty, its buildings ravaged by unknown horrors.

You see the pillars of Alternan history toppled in its fall, a roof caved in on a history of unchecked expansion before the rot from within took it.

You see a fallen ziggurat, crumbling under the pressure of nature’s revenge, water still pouring from it without end, even these hundreds of years later.

You see Alterna now.


You see what is left of the Alternan Empire now.