The Scrolls of Alphalon
IV
Scroll the Fourth
And the sky fell, with the sun, into darkness, for the first time anyone in Alphalon had ever known. Something no one had ever heard of but everyone called 'Night' came upon the land, and then rudely neglected to take its leave. And with the Night, came the winds. And with the winds, came the rain, and then the storms. Nobody anywhere knew anything about what to do about any of it, other than turn to The Coin. But 'The Coin' kept coming up empty.
The scrolls contained no answers for a dark that never lifts. 'The Coin' harboured no secret on how to brave a wind that bowls men over. 'Alchemy' couldn't solve condundrums washing in with some torrential downpour.
Provisioners and assistant barkeeps had to be hired back immediately at advanced ages to supply and design menus restricted by weather shocks, which were something that couldn't be done easily in scrolls, because it weren't popular enough. The Coin couldn't prop up banks anymore either, because numismatic enterprises were looking especially shaky, in the rain, and those were all they had.
And quakes! There were 'earthquakes' all of a sudden, and 'The Coin' came up with conflicting 'answers' as to why, none of which made any sense. It were as if it had never 'known' the answers to any questions at all.
Oh, they asked. They asked and asked (and asked). Alphalonians weren't running around setting fire to everything, come the Night, the way certain science fiction authors luridly anticipated. They were just trying to address real problems, but since nothing they needed to know by then could be found in the scrolls, and with no career knowledge-seekers left to tell them otherwise (as most had died early working the only jobs they could find—mining for Coin metal), the only way forward appeared to be to empty their scroll tubes to start fresh on 'virgin ream'.
Their entire rolled-up history had been rendered useless. Alphalon had become intellectually trapped, infrastructurally captured, dependent root and branch, every government and nearly every industry, on a pure flip of The Coin to make every decision. And they knew it, and it didn't matter, because the Alphalonians were still true believers in The Coin's by-then all-encompassing 'power'.
Everything rode on the Coinsmith's original claim that there were some 'magic' in his original formula and later 'refinements', but he himself had long since retired to the mysterious plateaus and then reportedly succumbed to a brain-wasting disease.
It were the worst-case scenario dreamed up by the most 'paranoid' of heretics. All devices based on solar cells, which had been considered until recently Alphalon's premier energy source, were dead on arrival. Traffic lights stopped directing traffic—what little of it remained, for most vehicle batteries had only been engineered to be charged by the sun. Hospitals could not conduct surgeries until they had secured emergency power, which they'd never needed to do before. Casinos, amusement street rides, maze ball arcades, drive-in bingo parlours, all went dark without a constant stream of commuters and cheap energy. Always-on broadcast relay stations no longer relayed nor broadcast. Even a few types of sewage treatment plants up and quit.
Simultaneously, the wind and rain were moving things around that had never been thought movable. A clatter of loose road signs and broken potted plants beat regularly at exteriors, rattling screenless doors and shutterless windows. Stacks of newspapers launched themselves single-file from city corners into the Night sky, unfolding in thunderous gales to ambush mailboxes, tree trunks, and children's laughing faces, for there were yet few who understood the full gravity of their situation.
Chunks of garbage started flying out of every trash receptacle, none of which had been covered in any way. Dust blew everywhere it weren't raining, and some places it were. The soils of Alphalon were set loose for not having been regularly challenged in such a way as to have accumulated resistance to erosion. Similarly, the winds were tearing open roofs one flaky shingle at a time, letting the warmth out—a serious problem because heating technologies had never been much needed and were in extremely short supply.
But air escaping weren't the most worrying threat to one's home in the encircling dark. Never having lived in a land where it had ever rained or grown cold, the builders of Alphalon hadn't learned to seal windows, doors, and other leaks, and not just on houses, but on nearly anything they'd ever made, and The Coin weren't any help on how to change things for the better. Houses collected swarms of insects driven out of their natural habitats, and the winds pushed rain into crevices where exposed wiring lay in wait, causing electrical boxes and poles to catch fire.
A number of power stations experienced shorts so destructive, they were described as having spontaneously exploded. Many homes burned down as unexpectedly, and people perished in those unpredictable fires.
Travel were something akin to the impossible. Even taxis whose batteries could still hold a charge in the cold often seized up in the rain, or electrocuted the occupants, or both, but such death traps were relied upon anyway due to widespread fear of train travel after a number of high-profile derailments due to slick or iced-up tracks.
Governments hadn't bothered to save anyone who could save electric vehicles, nor the power stations, and the different administrators' consultations with The Coin only served to cloud the issues due to conflicting results. Extra 'superior knowledge' sessions to try to clear things up took three moons to schedule due to political maneuvering, and then they would clear up nothing.
Insurance rates skyrocketed. Nearly a third of the population had been forced immediately into unemployment, and then the banks underpinning the city-states began their ultimate slide into insolvencies when too many of these unfortunates defaulted on their loans. One bank tried to avoid this fate by printing so much money that it looked like people's nest eggs might be wiped out by inflation, causing a run on that bank, which then failed anyway.
Commerce ground nearly to a halt, but prices persisted in going up (and up and up), as it were the only way to try to cover a cost explosion that wouldn't quit. The scroll economy, on the other hand, kept conspicuously booming, society having become dependent on it as the solution to every problem and problems not exactly being in short supply. The entire Alphalonian scroll catalogue had to be reinvented for a new world. Paper, wood, and ink sales headed skyward.
Reinvention needs reinventors, and there were plenty of candidates kicking around laid-off from their day jobs and still looking for Night work. Thus did membership rapidly expand in the loosely conglomerated Schools Of Radical Empiricists (SORE) and associated paramilitary corps. The SORE Corps secured smuggling routes through sometimes strife-prone territories for the movement of numismatic trainees into different (and often mutually opposed) 'constellations' of city-states, borrowing in the process a term recently conceived to describe the arrangements of twinkling lance-pricks that cruelly pierced the veiled sky, tantalising all of Alphalon with dancing dewdrops of the sun's light, but not a lick of heat.
These political pacts and decisions were not without controversy, for were not the SORE Corps rooted in the same Coiner goon squads who'd forced into concentration camps every remaining voice warning that the sun might tumble to the sea? Which it then did? Why trust the same characters who had sealed Alphalon's ignorant doom? But what else could Alphalonian principalities do? There were no other sources of sufficiently developed wisdom left than The Coin's, nor did any infrastructure remain for cultivating in the people and taking up from them another kind.
Having already abdicated most of their legislative power to the scrolls before sunfall, Alphalon's player-piano governments could only address their predicament by consulting them according to protocol. And so they did, for otherwise, instead of on The Coin, the blame for any impending catastrophes—and there were so many of those impending—would fall on them.
Consequently consulted with unprecedented frequency were The Ur-Mint, the original Coinsmith's famous first piece, at his estate's eponymous amphitheatre in ostentatious pilgrimages that changed nothing, because heavily vested interests on the verge of bankruptcy could not agree on whether the answers thus produced were correct, nor which one ruled whenever The Ur-Mint were contradicted by The Coins later forged. No system of priority had ever been devised, nor thought necessary, actual Coin flips having become exceedingly rare quite early in the actual usage of any topical scroll.
"Mine was the first, the original," would say the flipper, typically, of The Ur-Mint.
"Mine was perfected by etch testing," would say the flipper of The Coin later forged.
The centre could not hold. Each official holder of The Coin went a separate way, egged on by the variant landings of a separate instance of 'bare metal', and Alphalon muddled through as best it could. Once enough vehicle batteries to make a difference had been restored to working order using hydroelectric power, as well as decrepit combustive generators that had been considered prohibitively toxic, it were the roads themselves that became the bigger problem.
Roads were only ever built anymore according to 'tried and tested scrolls', the scrollers of which had acquired little basis for answering questions for themselves. In the absence of any guidance on how to prepare a surface for inclement weather, street crews just kept laying down surfaces that only a land of eternal sunshine could love, exactly as The Coin would have them do, and the results became quickly disarticulated in the harsh new climate.
Alphalonians were no longer generally aware of any methods for improving their methods—otherwise known as 'science'. Physically and metaphorically, they lived in a state of perpetual road repair. Rather than discourage reliance on inappropriate scrolls, city councils mandated everyone own a copy so they could apply shambolic patches whenever needed, and then when that failed to stem the tides of dissolution, more city ordinances were passed that outlawed driving on a clearly damaged surface—which they all were—without effecting at least one such pointless kludge.
This were a sign of desperation in the air, for the body counts had been on exponential increase and showed no sign of letting up. Constant rains had become constant rainstorms that became disastrous floods. Rivers that had swollen into marshes then swelled into lakes, with the local townsfolk building makeshift rafts from which to watch their lives sinking away beneath them. Villages that had been situated naively in basins were almost entirely submerged, with only the spire of a temple, perhaps, and a few rusting radio towers peeking above the waterline.
After the worst of these floods had begun to subside, then did approach a great and terrible lightning—electrical storms from the horizon where the sun had met its doom. As the horde of brilliant sea strikes advanced, tick-tocking almost in lockstep like an invasion force thundering across the Passable Ocean (so-named because it had been crossed but only dusky swamplands found beyond), the coral reefs revealed themselves in flashes beneath the waves, as if to highlight a spirit world from which the condemned souls of persecuted innocents, having drowned themselves in despair in the same coastal waters, arose to join the eldritch hosts in their dreadful final march upon the civilisations of Alphalon.
Then ash and dust and hail did fall upon the land, and there came a great Night smog, and the rains turned to acid. All who could not take shelter died, and skin and flesh and bone were muted and scarred, and over time, dissolved, until the smogs had dissipated, and the rains were beginning to lessen.
It were around then that the quakes had reached their peak, shocking all the land above and below so that the tremblings of it levelled an entire city-state, and another were split asunder. Even in the inland cities did Alphalon's monuments to The Coin and the culture that birthed it tumble.
There were hardly a tower left standing, except the squat sage keeps, long preserved as objects of ridicule, though they were turned in many cases, due to the sages' farsighted use of the hardiest materials, into prisons.
Climate refugees encroached on the remaining city-states, making unprecedented demands on their already strained resources. Armed standoffs and skirmishes became regular occurrences, and word got out of the fates of migrant groups who had been outright massacred or corralled into flooding-up canyons by deceptively 'helpful' SORE Corps.
The spread of these tales and the authenticity of the tellers marked the weeks and hours when the preternaturally resilient economy of The Coin began to flag and break pace. Dwindling ink supplies near disaster areas deepened that slump into a nosedive and sparked belligerent threats and brinksmanship among neighbouring states that needed to obtain supplies to keep serving the dictates of The Coin.
When key elements for the alloys involved in manufacturing The Coin became increasingly available only from flood-ravaged failed states, military interventions premptively secured supply chains for each competing constellation's coinsmiths.
During this period, insurance companies were going bankrupt with a regularity that puncuated the deaths of whole sectors of society. Over half of surviving working-age adults were unemployed, and more than a third of the rest were employed in disaster recovery.
Prices could not but crash at this stage because the big marketplaces had fallen silent. Almost nobody spent anything but time to get by anymore. Little or no cash could be found anywhere. Maybe it had all rolled into broken sewers, or maybe some hoarder somewhere had it all in his pants.
In lieu of owed taxes, which had become uncollectable, warlords took to securing bonds of fealty in blood and sacrifice: meat for some lord's table, or men for his armies, in exchange for 'protection' by same. Women, too, were traded like livestock.
Fully 90% of humans were dead within twelve moons after the falling of the sun. Over 80% of buildings and homes were in ruins. All political agreements were broken, every government that had made them in disrepute, every former highway so shredded, only by a procession of piles of gravel would you have known it were ever there.
Landmarks were getting harder to find in the Night. About the only thing Alphalonians could count on, and they really did count on it, were that moon. At least that pinhead moon still shone to chop up time by, months into weeks (into hours), moving through the same positions relative to the horizon it had always done, and much brighter than the faint spot it had presented against daylight.
Hardly bigger than a 'star', as the people had taken to calling its new neighbours, the pinhead moon acquired a kind of cult following to express gratitude for that one bold bit of continuity among the strangers in the sky, as if to encourage it to grow and reheat the whole of the land. And one would have to say the moon did its level best, for it spared every Alphalonian a ray of hope, and that were indispensible in the gruelling eons to come.
"The Scrolls of Alphalon",
written by Powell Quesne
and published on the 26th day
of October in the year 2026.
[ Last edited 10/26/2026. ]
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