There is a hopeful kind of pattern recognition that arises in many worlds, an optimistic extrapolation. “We have been through so much, and one way or another we have always figured it out, always come out stronger. Surely we will struggle our way through to the far side of any advertsity, stronger than we entered it.” This is understandable but untrue.

A city may persist in divers evolutionary forms through many ages. Its color fades from verdant to parchment and back as damp gives way to drought. Rare minerals are hewn and wrested from the ground. Guilds of strange expertises and agendas rise to prominence or die away. Invaders are repelled, barely. Economic crises are navigated, more or less expertly. The city forgets its origins, even its everyday ways of just a handful of generations ago. Its map pulsates and undulates like a microorganism as it gains and yields territory. It some unforeseeable solemn instant, the city ceases to be. It could be for any number of reasons. The city always found a way to persist, since before all recorded memory, until it did not.

All worlds have stories of settlements ended abruptly by some natural cause, some internal strife, that none within it could predict or prevent: tectonic, diluvial, irruptive, or otherwise. A healthy organism can fall into a chasm. The same can occur on the world-scale, fitting easily within a generation.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.