Fall

Featured Article — 02-2025

Content Warning:

Falls are cities built in and around dead kraken-whales. The article describes the architecture of the city as it relates to the body of the whales.

The Falls are large submarine cities historically built on the backs of, and inside of, dead kraken-whales. As bastions of culture and fashionable life, the metropoles, the largest of the Falls, boast the desirable housing in the oceans of Neptune. Life in the Falls is varied, ranging from urban life in quaint historical districts, modern high-rises, and marinas of remorae, independent water-crafts owned by the ultrawealthy, to rural life on the fins. Since the fins are too delicate and agile to sustain mass construction, they instead host vast agricultural skinfields and serve as mooring for kelp-forests.

As the population of Kraken-Whales have dwindled, modern Falls are instead made in their image. Empowered by the advances in organic architecture, new Falls are fully mechanical and man-made.

Anatomy of a Fall

From the humble beginnings of skinfields and fleshfields, to modern day wonders like the Sonar Orchestrions, the Falls have created several cross-disciplinary fields marrying anatomy and architecture, taxidermy and construction. The Falls need to function as submarine, city, and as organisms. Without fins to swim through the waters, bladders to control depth, and acoustic organs to communicate with the city would be as dead as its substrate.

The architecture of a Fall is separated into the epidermal, the desirable skin-side, and the subdermal layers, also known as the corpus, the internal body. Epidermal construction is only skin deep, with only high-rise architecture necessitating burrowing down to the bone. The subdermal internals of a Fall, even the mechanical sort, is unpleasantly warm and cramped. Roadveins help the internal workers swim around the body. Affordable housing is crammed into the corpus, next to the noisy roadveins and between false organs.

Rise and Fall

The oldest Falls have been lost to the depths and the erosion of time. Nothing would be known about the first societies born on the backs of the kraken-whales, were it not for the Memorial Molars. These reliefs carved into ancient teeth were preserved to the present day by people carrying them between Falls. The Memorial Molars depict ritual human sacrifice, the cultivation of fields in the flesh, and grand hunts. Early historical records depict Falls as autocratic, evolving from petty kingdoms to vast empires spanning entire processions of kraken-whales.

As technology evolved enterprising individuals set out to hunt and establish their own domains, the advent of the Hunter-Colonialist era. This era culminated in the horror of the Blood Rush, and kraken-whales were hunted to near extinction. The same technological advancement that began their doom became their saviour with the construction of the first fully mechanical Fall.

Despite protective measures, kraken-whales continue to teeter on the brink of extinction. Not only are the thin populations spread across wide oceans, it is hard to count what even remains. Kraken-whales now avoid people, diving deeper into the maws of the depths than ever before.

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See Also

♆ Neptune
Locations Fall ( Albino Palace ) Characters Venilia VII · Blue NM-2 · Fritz Fram · Duwana · Thauma Magallana Society Humanoids ( Oceanid ) · Traditions ( Symbiosis ) · Organizations ( Sentinel )

Alternative Names

Metropole, Whale-City

Parent Location

Neptune

Famous Falls

Albino Palace