Surviving Arkadia

The Talian Peninsula has a spine of hills that runs down its centre for most of its length. I say hills because that’s what they looked like from above. They were rounded and worn down and eroded stubs that had once been a true mountain range and so the word that leapt into my mind was hills. I’m fairly sure that many of them were mountains by any reasonable definition of mountain.

The Citadel followed the eastern side of the hills almost to the tip of the peninsula then it turned around and followed the western side northwards. It made no sense. We were headed back to danger.

As people began to realise that the Mayor and the Council truly had no control over the path the Citadel took, the pressure to flee increased. Whenever I went out with the Scavenging and Foraging teams some people would simply walk away and wouldn’t be found when it was time to leave. People with families in Talia began to petition the Council to be allowed to use the Gondolas if we went within a day's walk of where their family lived.

All the time this was going on the Mayor and the more well connected members of the Emergency Council were engaged in desperate diplomacy. The city had ties of some kind to almost every town and city on the continent but it didn’t have much in the way of recent treaties.

Right after the Defence of Moonstone the first council had made treaties with the great cities of the continent. In theory the Ostian Empire was in breach of those treaties. In theory we could rely upon the other cities to enforce the treaties. In practice the only way they could force the Ostians to stop would be to declare war. Nobody wanted to declare war on anyone, particularly not on the Ostian Empire.

When the treaties were written all the signatories were city-states Now Ostia was at the head of an empire and while some of the other cities had been absorbed into alliances or small nations none of them had a standing army. The most the Mayor could get out of them was a promise not to trade with Ostia.

The Talian Federation had discussed offering the Citadel sanctuary and expelling the Ostian military from Talian Soil. They stopped discussing it when the Ostian Navy blockaded a couple of their major ports.

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When the Citadel first dropped away from the rest of Moonstone I had assumed that it was acting according to some sort of plan. It was clear that the Mayor had triggered it so I assumed that it was his plan. When I was co-opted onto the Emergency Council I discovered that the plan predated the current Mayor by generations, and that the beginning and end of the plan was releasing the Citadel from its chains and allowing it to move on its own. No-one was directing it.

Once I found out that no-one was steering I began to think that the Citadel was just drifting, perhaps it was following some current in the source winds that was too subtle for me to sense. As it turned out I was wrong. The Citadel was looking for something and finally it found it.

It was early morning and I was on the roof of the City Council building, overseeing Parkour practice, when I realised that there was something coming towards us through the clouds.

That’s how it seemed at first, before my perception shifted and I realised that the thing I could see was stationary and we were moving towards it. The movement of the Citadel slowed as it approached the thing in the clouds.

I told the group I was monitoring to take a break and climbed down to street level. By then the sun was properly up and the clouds were burning off in the heat of the day. I walked to the edge of the Citadel for a closer look at the thing we were headed towards. It was a sheer cliff face on the side of a mountain. The top of the mountain had been flattened into a plateau. There had been a town on the plateau once but it was long since abandoned.

As we got closer I realised that the cliff face wasn’t as flat as I had supposed. It was curved, deliberately shaped, as if to receive something, or as if something had been cut away from it. Something roughly the size and shape of the Citadel. It felt like the Citadel had come home.