The Altalian Convergence

Altalia: a fertile peninsula jutting from the western edge of a barren continent. To the east, only dust. Three towns occupy its length—Velanza, Pirentia, Nakares—separated by mountains and forest. For nine centuries they have grown alone. They do not know the others exist. Soon, that will change.

Velanza

Velanza climbs the hillsides in terraces. Twenty-one thousand people live here, farming plots cut into the slopes generations ago. The terraces are narrow—thirty feet wide at most—and they step up the hills like a giant's staircase. Stand at the bottom at dawn and look up: stone retaining walls dark with dew, turned earth, the movement of people bent to their work. Above it all, the sound of cowbells from the upper pastures.

The bells ring differently for each herd. Deep bronze for some families, high iron for others, notes that carry for miles in the clear morning air. The herders know their cattle by sound alone. In the olive groves at dusk, you can hear three valleys at once, each with its own melody.

The cattle are long-horned, shaggy, bad-tempered. They pull plows and provide meat twice a year. The wool blankets here are woven so tight they shed rain, some patterned with red borders or blue geometric designs that have passed between families for generations. These blankets are the only inheritance besides land.

Property moves by inheritance only. A family owns its terraces the way it owns its name. The plots pass father to son, mother to daughter, unbroken for centuries. When harvests fail, families starve on their own land before anyone suggests redistribution. When a bloodline ends, the terraces sit empty—held in trust for distant cousins who may never arrive—while neighboring families farm dangerous ravine slopes that slide in heavy rain. The law does not bend. It is older than anyone living, and living people bend before it breaks.

At the top of the town stand three marker-houses where weather-readers work. They learned to read sky and wind from their parents, who learned from theirs. At dawn they mark predictions on the walls in charcoal and ochre: spirals for storms, dots for temperature, lines for wind direction. When wrong, they paint over the symbols and tell no one.

The weather-readers are divided. The eldest find their predictions wrong more frequently—rain that doesn't come, frost that arrives early, wind from the wrong quarter. The younger readers say the patterns have shifted, that the old markers no longer apply. Both methods continue. Both sometimes fail. Farmers plant according to whichever reader they trust more. The council will not rule on which method is correct. To rule would mean admitting the traditional system might be wrong.

The town council is seventeen people who sit in a windowless round house and make decisions by consensus. They still reach consensus—always have. But consensus now means enforcing old rules more strictly. Exile used to be reserved for murder. Now it extends to property violations, to cattle-breeding experiments, to questions that threaten the system. The families comply. The law is preserved.

Inside a Velanzan house: stone walls two feet thick, small windows that frame the valley like paintings, iron tools resharpened until the blades are half their original width. Ceramic jars that have held grain for forty years. At night, oil lamps turn the stone warm and golden. The smell of bread baking. The sound of someone singing in the next terrace over, voice carrying on the wind.

The young people gather in the olive groves after dark. The old trees twist up from the earth like frozen dancers, their leaves silver in moonlight. Here, away from the marker-houses and the council, they talk about what lies over the mountains. Some will stay. Some won't. The groves remember both kinds.

Velanza works through law and precedent. When crisis comes—and it comes regularly—they do not reform. They enforce harder. They exile the non-compliant. They preserve the system. Afterward, the bells still ring at dawn, each family's pitch unchanged, the sound carrying across valleys where some terraces lie empty and others overflow with people who have nowhere else to go.

Pirentia

Pirentia sits where limestone cliffs cup the land in a natural amphitheater. A whisper at the center carries to the edges. A shout at the rim crashes back on itself. The sixteen thousand people here pitch their voices without thinking, modulating to the space. A child learns this before learning to walk.

Everything happens in public. Decisions, disputes, celebrations, judgments—all require an audience. When families argue, they stand in the amphitheater while the town watches and shouts. Whoever gets the loudest support wins. Three weeks later the same families might argue again, and the crowd might decide differently. Nothing is permanent. Everything is up for reconsideration.

Projects start and stop. Resources get allocated and reallocated. The west cisterns need expansion. The south quarter needs repair. The gathering house needs rebuilding. The crowd's mood shifts like weather. One week they vote for construction, the next week they reverse themselves. Nothing finishes. Or everything finishes eventually, just not in any planned way.

The town is covered in images. House walls show painted gatherings—festivals, arguments, ceremonies. The figures are distorted: limbs too long, faces half-finished, proportions that bend and spiral. The colors clash deliberately: orange on green, purple on yellow, combinations that vibrate in sunlight. Even tools carry decoration. Pottery comes out of kilns covered in faces and spirals, the clay still warm to the touch, the glazes deep blue and copper-red.

Watch a potter at the wheel and you see why people stay. The clay rises under her hands like it's breathing. She's not thinking about technique—her hands know. Everyone here makes something: pots, paintings, woven wall-hangings, carved spoons with handles that twist like vines. The finest artisans make pieces so perfectly formed they seem to move in candlelight. Some families celebrate these objects. Others throw them away because perfection feels like an accusation.

But some people can't make art. Not won't—can't. They work as haulers: carrying water, repairing walls, clearing refuse. The town calls them the silent hands. The term is both description and dismissal. These haulers ask questions no one answers: Why does making matter? Who decided? What if I'm not built this way?

The amphitheater fills for debates that return like seasons. Should children learn by watching or by explicit instruction? Should ceremonies be preserved or reformed? Should the best work be displayed communally or kept private? The traditionalists shout one answer. The reformers shout another. The crowd cheers both sides. They vote. Next month they vote again and reverse themselves. But the debates themselves—the noise, the passion, the sense that tomorrow might bring consensus—this is what holds them together.

Children are raised communally. When a child is born, the whole town tracks the pregnancy, comments on it, compares it to others. The child rotates between households: mornings with potters, afternoons with weavers, evenings wherever. Biological parents have no formal authority beyond the weight of everyone knowing whose child it is. On festival nights, the amphitheater fills with children performing dance-plays, their movements exaggerated and strange, and no one can say which family taught them because everyone did.

The ceremonies are changing. Attendance drops, then surges, then drops again. Some families keep their children home. Others bring three generations. The older generation calls it disrespect. The younger generation says the ceremonies have become performances without meaning. Both groups argue about it passionately. Nothing changes, or everything changes, depending on which week you ask.

At sunset, the amphitheater glows. The limestone catches the light and holds it, turns pink, then orange, then deep red. People gather without planning to, drawn by the beauty of the space itself. Someone starts singing. Others join. The acoustics turn individual voices into something larger, something that seems to come from the stone itself. For an hour, no one argues. Then someone proposes something, and the shouting begins again, and that's Pirentia—beauty and chaos, art and dysfunction, community that can't sustain communal projects but can't imagine living any other way.

Nakares

Nakares is carved into the western cliffs where the ocean hammers rock. Ten thousand people live in houses cut into stone, stacked vertically over three hundred feet. From the beach they look like a honeycomb—dark openings connected by rope ladders that twist in constant wind.

Each house is one or two rooms carved back until the stone gets too hard to work. The work takes years. Families expand their homes one hammer-blow at a time, the sound echoing up and down the cliff face like a conversation. Inside, the stone stays cool even in summer. At night, you hear the ocean through the walls, a deep pulse that never stops.

The ladders sway with your weight. Children learn to climb at three—hand over hand, don't look down, lean into the cliff when wind gusts. People fall. Not often. Enough. The body stays on the rocks for a day so the town can witness it, then goes to the ocean. The family records the death in their ledger. Life continues.

The ledgers are everything here. Each household keeps them, written on dried pressed seaweed that cracks after twenty years. Not summaries—detail. What they ate, who visited, what they found on the beach, how they felt. "Woke early. Descended to beach. Found eleven shells, four whole. Discussed tide schedules with Mor—he thinks timing has shifted. Felt uncertain. Ate dried fish. Went to bed unsettled." That entry is forty years old. The woman who wrote it is dead. Her great-granddaughter reads it when she needs to feel connected to something beyond her brief life.

Read enough ledgers and you see patterns. The same arguments repeat every generation. The same shells appear in the same season. The same doubts surface in the same words. The ledgers hold centuries of human experience, compressed and preserved. They smell like salt and old paper. They crack when you turn the pages. They make the past feel present.

The collecting is constant. Shells—they've documented 287 varieties, noting where each appears, what it means about currents. Stones that fit the hand just right. Driftwood that suggests shapes. Bones from sea creatures. Kelp formations that dried into forms like frozen waves. Nothing gets thrown away. The houses fill with centuries of gathered objects, each one labeled, dated, described. Some families store overflow in communal caves, in cracks in the cliff. The caves smell like ocean and time.

Right action is the obsession. How should one behave toward others, objects, oneself? When conflict arises—and in this cramped vertical life it arises constantly—both parties go to the judgment house. They sit and talk until they understand exactly what happened and why. Not to punish. Not to apologize. To achieve perfect mutual understanding. Sometimes this takes days. Sometimes weeks. The process is exhausting. Neither party can quit because quitting means accepting that understanding might be impossible.

So they use substances to endure it. Fermented kelp that stretches time, makes the judgment process feel less unbearable. Leaves that burn into smoke that makes thoughts distant. Breathing techniques that produce a state they call empty—not peace, just absence. Everyone knows a dozen ways to alter consciousness. Which to use when facing judgment, when needing to work without thought, when needing to stop experiencing yourself. The substances aren't recreational. They're how you get through life in Nakares.

Three years ago, something broke. Mira Kolesh stopped writing her ledger. She stopped collecting. She sat in her doorway and watched the ocean. Her neighbor noticed, then did the same. Within a week, half the upper cliff had stopped. Within three weeks, it had spread to the lower levels—not everyone, but many. Essential care continued: parents fed children, the sick were tended, basic food was gathered. But the ledgers stopped. The judgment houses sat empty. The collection ceased. For six weeks, several thousand people sat and watched the ocean while the rest kept them alive.

Then Mira picked up her ledger again. Others saw. Within days, everyone had resumed. They wrote about the call of the sea. And continued as before. These collapses have happened throughout their history. Usually they last longer—months, even. Why? No one is sure. The question is being discussed, documented thoroughly, and resolved not at all.

The ocean is everything here. They know it with impossible precision—which seaweeds heal, which harm, which are edible only after drying. They know storms three days out by how light falls on water. They know rhythms tapped on stone that match the tide pulse and calm distress. At dawn, the ocean turns silver. At sunset, copper. At night under a full moon, it glows with living things that pulse like stars. People climb down to swim in the dark water, phosphorescence trailing from their arms like light made liquid.

The cliff face at certain angles catches the sunset and turns gold. The rope ladders hang like vertical roads. Somewhere above, someone is singing—the sound carried on wind, bouncing off stone. Somewhere below, waves crash and retreat. Between the two, suspended in air, ten thousand people live crammed into carved stone, documenting everything, seeking right action, periodically stopping everything to watch the water.

The Coming Convergence

The year is 930. Velanza is holding to law while young people plan departures. Pirentia is arguing about everything while the arguments themselves hold the town together. Nakares is documenting its own patterns while waiting for the next great dissociation.

In the decades ahead, the mountains will be crossed. Three peoples, shaped by isolation into different answers to the same human questions, will meet for the first time. What happens then, no marker reads, no image shows, no ledger predicts.