Din Talin

The end of the week, sometime in the afternoon, towards the end of spring. The air is warm without being humid, and the sun casts a perfect orange spell over every inch of the city. Outside the impressive, utilitarian face of the national Treasury, workers hurry to pub gardens or park benches. Students giggle outside stores, spending precious coins on sweets. The streets themselves are excited for summer.

The rectangular order of this place has been changed for the amorphous, indecisive shapes of a cityscape ridden with disease. The march of Youth Servants is replaced by the skittering of rats. The earthy scent of an agricultural city and its roots is replaced by the choke of decay. In what was the capital city of what was the great country of Din Talin, death encroaches surely on the territory of the once-living.

Death does this everywhere.

But, in Din Talin, amidst the aimless creaking of doors thrown wide and abandoned in hurry, the crumbling edifices of the Language Academy and Institute of Natural Sciences and the places of Faith-worship at every street corner and turn… in Din Talin, where order was long since cast aside by panic, who prefers chaos… in Din Talin, where it was proven beyond any doubt that lineage is only as strong as its weakest link…

In Din Talin, death is empowered.

There is no longer any such as place as Din Talin. In its stead grow bolder the vines through nooks and crannies, bolder the stench of bodies heaped face-to-face and forgotten in the corners of prayer rooms, bolder the glint-eyed raiders who travel in inhuman packs, unapproachable. Soon they too will find this place emptied of all that which sustains even half-lives, and they will disappear. Din Talin will lie deserted for a very long time, at which point travellers will happen upon its ruins and decide that it has been rediscovered. As for the infrastructure, or its remnants, they will deem it sublime; the primitive shrines to lesser gods, they will deem simple-minded. As for half-fallen buildings that must have formed central Government, the headquarters of Defence, and the Treasury, future settlers will turn over their stones and laugh at the rudimentary design. It is no wonder that such unimaginative construction was vulnerable to mere earthquakes. For the people of the past, it must have seemed like the end of the world.

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