A Complete History of the Fall

It calls itself complete. The archive has filed it as one account among others.

Recorded history

The document presents itself as the complete history of the Fall. The archive has retitled it with an indefinite article and files it accordingly.

That is not a judgement on its accuracy. Where the account touches ground the archive has surveyed it is frequently right, and it is the most sustained narrative of the collapse in the collection by a considerable margin. The difficulty is that it is one voice, it names no source, and it carries no date, and the archive holds other accounts it cannot reconcile with this one.

The years before

It opens on decades of prosperity, and is unsentimental about them. Technology advanced quickly. Supply chains crossed the country. Industry flourished, shelves stayed full, and people were employed. Government and private enterprise worked in concert to keep it that way.

Among the institutions it names is the Rottingham Financial Authority, a private banking organisation that financed reconstruction projects, military contracts and emergency infrastructure.

The crisis

The first signs were the kind that are easy to ignore.

Extreme weather disrupted harvests. Fuel ran short. Shipping slowed, prices rose overnight, and panic buying emptied the shops within hours. Governments answered with emergency powers: roadblocks, fuel rationing, and private security firms contracted to hold key infrastructure.

The Rottingham Financial Authority was granted temporary powers to coordinate the emergency distribution of supply. The account records that those powers were never given back.

Iron Haven

The account describes an enormous pre-Fall logistics and industrial hub, converted as society deteriorated into the fortified settlement now called Iron Haven, its walls thrown around warehouses already full of food, medicine and ammunition.

The archive draws attention to this, because it cannot be squared with what is on file. The Settlers are recorded elsewhere as having built Iron Haven out of old stone and reinforced steel, as the proof of an argument about what survival was for. This account has them gathering around something that was already standing.

Both versions are retained. The archive is unable to choose between them and declines to invent a sequence in which both are true.

On one point the account is unambiguous, and it is a point the archive had not previously established: the permits, the regulated trade, the recorded weapons and the taxes were there from the beginning. They were not imposed on Iron Haven by anyone. They were the terms on which it was founded, and the account states that most people accepted them as necessary.

The sickness

Isolated outbreaks began to appear: fever, confusion, aggression. Officials announced that the illness was contained, and the account reports those announcements without appearing to believe them.

Then it moves on to the collapse.

No treatment is described, no remedy proposed and no physician named. Whatever was eventually done about the sickness is not in this document, and the archive notes the absence rather than filling it.

The collapse

Then everything failed at once, having failed slowly for years.

Power stations shut down. Communications went. Towns dropped off official maps. Military units deserted, police stations emptied, hospitals overflowed. The account is careful to say that civilisation did not end on a particular day. It simply stopped functioning. That is the one sentence in it every other account the archive holds appears to agree with.

Nothing in the account burns. No strike is described, no weapon is used, and the sky does not change colour anywhere in it. The archive is obliged to say that this is not a difference of emphasis. The three days the skies burned are the one physical event the accounts describe in the same words, and the archive treats them as established. A history that runs from the harvests to the opening of the war without mentioning them has left something out, and does not appear to know it has.

The factions

With government gone, communities chose how to survive, and the choices hardened into names.

Those who gathered at Iron Haven and believed in organised defence became the Settlers. Those who left the cities to live by scavenging and trade among the ruins became the Scavengers. Former soldiers, security personnel and loyalists who stayed inside the walls to keep order became the Remnants. Those who sold their skills between settlements and joined nothing were the first Mercenaries.

The account has the Remnants inside Iron Haven from the beginning. They were not. They moved in when the city changed hands, in front of a considerable number of witnesses, and the archive treats that as settled.

This is the one claim in the document that can be checked against something people saw, and it fails. The archive records that, and leaves the reader to decide what it implies about the parts that cannot be checked.

The silent war

For months there was an uneasy peace, and the account is clear that it was neither peaceful nor quiet.

Trade continued. Scavengers worked the abandoned towns, Settlers rebuilt farms and workshops, Remnants held the walls. Every week supplies were scarcer than the week before, and no faction became self-sufficient.

Then settlements began to disappear. Convoys were ambushed. Old rivalries opened into fighting, and rumours ran ahead of all of it: of hidden ledgers, of research that had not been disclosed, of medical records that were missing. The archive records the existence of those rumours and has been unable to establish the truth of any of them.

The account closes with the war for Iron Haven beginning. Everything else in this collection happens after its last sentence.

What the account does not say

It never says when it was written, or when any of it happened.

It never says where the sickness came from. It describes the outbreaks and the official announcements in sequence, and passes over the origin of the thing being announced as though the question had not arisen.

It names no author, cites no source, and interviews nobody.

For a document this certain about everything else, the archive regards these as the most informative things about it.

Archive notes

• Undated, unattributed, uncorroborated as a whole. Accurate in parts the archive can check.
• Records the Rottingham Financial Authority's emergency distribution powers, and that they were not returned.
• Has Iron Haven converted from an existing industrial hub, not built. Cannot be reconciled with the Settlers record.
• Has the Remnants garrisoning Iron Haven from the founding. Contradicted by what happened, in front of witnesses, when the city changed hands.
• Establishes that permits, taxation and recorded weapons date from the founding of Iron Haven rather than from the occupation.
• Describes no strike and no burning sky. The three days are established elsewhere; this account passes over them entirely.
• Describes the outbreaks and the containment announcements. Mentions no cure and names no physician.
• Silent on the origin of the sickness.