The Scrolls of Alphalon
V
Scroll the Fifth
The Night lasted and lasted. It lasted so long, it lasted longer than all of recorded history before the sun fell from the sky.
The quakes had diminished into mere tremors by then, but it had become cold, bitter cold. If science hadn't have discovered how to exploit certain highly reactive minerals well before the numismatic era, everyone in Alphalon would have surely perished.
The natural water supplies of several poorly situated city-states had frozen completely solid, but the denizens considered themselves lucky not to have been in one of the more poorly situated city-states that glaciers had swallowed whole.
Dwellings built by those who thought temperatures below freezing were impossible had ended up cracked: cracked roofs; cracked rafters; cracked walls; cracked 'concrete' down to the foundations. Some houses had come up with so many faults, they'd collapsed in on themselves and all but dried up and blown away. Electrical poles had crimped over all-in-a-row, having pulled each other down by wires that had long since disappeared, leaving them looking like dominos in mid-fall, though no Alphalonian had ever seen a domino and the vast majority never would.
The visages of Alphalon's larger-than-life statues had cracked up as well, their lips parched away from their chins, arms and legs missing from where the elements had interrupted them. The facades of colossal edifices had become ravaged and blistered, bits of debris sliding out and down and leaving running streaks of refuse down the sides. Every stadium had been reduced to an empty skeleton with maybe a shred of a thread hanging from a twisted flagpole. And the cold had preserved it all in its final state of ruin. It were like a world in rigor mortis.
It had been at the incipience of this doomed tableau that a final opportunity had arrived for the recovery of genuine wisdom in the land.
By the time temperatures were hitting bottom—after seeming to level off a couple of moons beyond sunfall before continuing to plunge for hundreds of moons more—every single vehicle had become inoperable, or would only 'drive' by shaking apart. Even if the built-in battery could generate power (and most never would again), the known mechanical lubricants would congeal at anything far below room-like temperatures, and no other formula had been recorded in the scrolls, for there had never been a need. But now, doors wouldn't open, and wheels wouldn't turn, and besides, many of both had split or flaked apart.
It were almost exclusively pedestrians and mounted traffic, then, waylaid when the bridges crumbled. There weren't an overpass in the land that hadn't at least buckled, with long planks and iron grates laid down for people and animals to traverse the numerous pitfalls. You couldn't have driven a bus or taxi over most of these without bringing down the whole structure.
What endured, for the most part, were the trees. Not that they weren't heard groaning and screeching, and iced-over branches did fall, and dead trunks topple. But primeval forests that had outlasted the conflagrations heralding the Night, stood the cold as well, and the Alphalonians seized this opportunity to re-string much of their electrical grid through the treelines alongside 'roads' which had become bridle paths.
The Alphalonian plant kingdom, at least, appeared to have known what it were doing all along—sparking a revival of interest in popularly misunderstood old broadcast recordings about biology—but in the animal world, humanity not excluded, a mass extinction approached of a kind where any type of beast at all 'making it' would be an exception to the rule.
A growing sense developed among those who'd seen and heard the resurfaced video archives that this weren't supposed to be happening. None of it. Something had been missed. But the language of science had been lost to the scrolls for hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of moons. These optical disc recordings were difficult for modern Alphalonians to decipher, and antique projection technology even more difficult to come by.
A kind of oral history took shape among the ascetic hermits who'd enjoyed a rare opportunity to witness a screening. Word were spreading that there were another way of thinking about Alphalon's problems, but the spreaders of that word were in a race against a grim reaper.
Since no one could withstand conditions outside, they were forced to remain in structurally unsound shelters on the verge of falling apart, resulting in weekly stories of yet another hundred or thousand lost when their 'house fell'. This caused more deaths cumulatively than any other peril in the Night.
People in desperate straits and afeared of the alternatives committed suicide in their homes, or walked willingly into freshly downed electrics. Peoples whose houses were disintegrating slightly faster than others, due to infelicitous construction, struck up invasion forces to 'steal homes' from those others, which meant killing them (who'd made luckier choices in building materials that would not begin to dissolve until, ironically, just a few moons later). In some cases, those in less-than-viable homes already open to the elements were massacred in their beds by stealthy invaders in order to preempt the moment they might feel forced to violently seek better accommodations elsewhere.
But the most destructive wars in the thousands and thousands (and thousands) of cold moons to come were fought not between the haves and have-nots but rather between gangs of plunderers allied with competing SORE Corps that had been tasked with picking through rubble and harvesting the spoils from collapsed buildings: salvaging food, blankets, electrical wire, and even the odd combustive generator, wherever such vanishingly sought-after pre-numismatic equipment could be found. No one left alive knew how to build one, and the scrolls categorised it 'unsafe' and thus would only answer, "NO!"
If a plundering tribe and associated SORE Corps arrived at a fresh fall early enough, they'd throw a banquet and feast on the dead (were they so inclined, for not everyone had yet abandoned the old taboos). Those who could not secure—by luck, ingenuity, depravity, or force—a source of nourishment and fresh flowing water, perished from plague or famine, a fate so common that the simple abandonment of prisoners to it became a standard (though unusually cruel) form of capital punishment. It were convenient, and so it were done, and damned (and damned) be the damned, were the new way of doing things.
In the long run, 98% of the pre-dusk population were lost, but eventually, the scrolls of Alphalon lived on, in a nearly complete new set inscribed to contain the cumulative answers of the radical empiricists on how to suffer the travails of the Night. These answers had been bought dearly, line-by-line, at the cost of human lives by the thousands, simply to test 'empirically' this-or-that 'YES!' or 'NO!' answer.
Any former scholarly bases for avoiding such irrational outcomes were simply not extant. What literature hadn't been torn up to feed the scrolls got swallowed up by floods and quakes. Only a flip of The Coin and the votes of life or death mattered anymore, because playing trial-and-error with their lives happened to be the only tool for discovery that Alphalonians had seen fit to preserve and adapt with.
But that's not nothing, and adapt they did, though generations ended up dashed on the rocks. Having learned one true lesson, at least, the SORE alchemists kept Alphalon's original set of scrolls in storage, on what seemed the unlikely chance of the return of the day.
As plodding and brutal as it were, the maximum-pain-for-minimum-gain modus operandi of the SORE Corps moved faster than the scattered remaining historians of the oral historians of old-timey science, attempting in their dissipating hovels, like their parents and grandparents (and great-grandparents) had before them, to rekindle the spirit of rationalism and pre-numismatic intellectual inquiry depicted in those long-decomposed video platters now lyricised in their own epic poetry. Without a population already accustomed to recognising scientific methods, however, they found these practically impossible to cultivate during a perpetually starved midnight.
"If we laid down first principles to re-establish foundations of knowledge..." some rekindler said but there they stopped him.
"All the principles are in the scrolls," moaned some hungry-rat-looking midnighter. "Why brave the cold to learn new ones?"
"The scrolls don't know," said the rekindler. "They do not think nor plan. They are just oddly-accessed static information."
"And if we 'think' our way into countering The Coin? We'll be out on our asses!" said the midnighter, and he had a point.
"The Coin is just a coin," said the rekindler, blaspheming, but no one cared a bit, because it were too late to matter.
No one would have risked explusion from a SORE Corps-backed enclave under that late Night sky. For better or worse, The Coin had become the only viable way to acquire knowledge, and according to the epics, that shift had occurred so far back in time that the Night hadn't even arrived yet. Things were hardly going to change now that it had. The severely put-upon Alphalonians had no choice but to follow their inherited folly to its logical conclusions.
Scrolling expeditions were sent forth by the SORE Corps on a variety of exploratory routes across the land, testing different conflicting answers by The Coin as to where to find food and water, with only the tribes whose expeditions lucked out surviving. Their bits of oft-peculiar survival wisdom, such as "Ought we to venture forth when the Pinhead Moon moves parallel with the horizon? NO!" were recorded in scrolls that were then copied and passed down.
During this period in Alphalonian history, surviving tribes and SORE Corps factions became one and the same, after having been increasingly referred to simply as 'SORE tribes' and warring for as long as anyone could remember, each on each, somewhere or other, based on the random dicta of The Coin.
While the winners of these conflicts were often literally a toss-up, if some random dictum being served interfered with a SORE tribe's competitiveness, the tribe and thus its interpretations of 'The Coin's wisdom' would not survive.
The Coin's decisions on adjusting agriculture for the cold and artificial light resulted in failures of harvest upon harvest (upon harvest), and starvation of randomly two out of every five SORE tribes. Formerly eradicated strains of disease spread among animals that fed on corpses after 'house falls', evolving into new strains and then jumping back to the human scavengers visiting the same finds, only in freshly lethal variants. The Coin-approved antibiotic and vaccine 'trials' resulted in the random destruction of two out of every seven SORE tribes.
Lessons were learned 'by' The Coin from each and every one of these human sacrifices. Another flip fixed. Another toss tested and laid to rest with its disciples. It were, in fact, 'a work in progress'—in lethal progress—that is, until it became 'it': the long-awaited promise of 'The Coin', realised.
The road leading there had been rocky, to be sure, and from some generations almost every person had perished under a single crossing of the moon. But now that The Coin's human guinea pigs had experienced everything the climate had in store for Alphalon, they had a hard-earned 'New Data' answer for, well, everything the climate had in store for Alphalon, day or Night.
"The catechism of cataclysm," those few, those brave, the hardscrabble historians of historians of science, dubbed it from their homeless shelters, perhaps with a sarcasm entirely missed by what remained of the media, though none lived long enough to confirm that interpretation either way.
Such subtle warnings were made to look foolish, perhaps, a few thousands of moons later when—in the stillness left behind after one particularly stormy spell in which the earth shook once again, and great lightning strikes just as described in the epic 'Of the Fall of the Sun' were briefly seen assaulting lands upon the horizon—the sun did then reappear. Breaking where the storms had cleared, it began its infinitessimally gradual ascent into its mythically rightful region of the sky, just peeking, at first, above that same horizon.
But it were the opposite horizon from where it fell.
That little detail sent the last descendant of the homeless historians of historians of science into a tizzy in his gutter bundle, for it suggested that the land weren't beneath the sky at all, but rather inside it, and that the pinhead moon had never been 'traversing the caves of the underworld' as told in myth, but had rather passed around the land whole, like the sun's giant ball of fire surely did, for else would it have been extinguished by earth or water.
This were an idea that only he were left to understand the logic and significance of, beyond folk tales about fire demons from 'The Other Side'. But this notion of the system having somehow overlooked that the lands were not infinite, and were possibly not even flat, fed an undercurrent of unease in what remained of Alphalon's intellectual 'classes'—meaning in the one mind of this one man heaped (in that one gutter) with the last of his worldly possessions.
But celebrations intensified at the growing prospect of a return of 'real' warmth to the land, and nobody whose opinion mattered noticed a thing amiss.
Under the next moons, as that flaming sphere manifested itself to a populace that had only heard about it from fables, the Night scrolls were put away in due course and the musty old day scrolls fetched from storage. In many cases, The Coin's originals had to be reconstructed from partially damaged copies found in the SORE Corps' various repositories, but all were recovered and restored, and any remaining fears in the populace fell away as the sunlit ways of the ancients were proven useful again, and started working again, and paying off (again).
After a mostly tolerable spate of 'transit tremors', they called them, Alphalon and its people seemed readier than ever to weather the dark and the light, the cool and the warm, the wet and the dry. The scrolls had become right for all climes. So these were good times! Especially after the first few weeks had passed when the land had warmed through. It were just balmy out: not quite sweltering but like an ever-cosy blanket, very far from the deep freeze of Night, much as temperatures were attested to have been in the oldest scrolls.
There would be no further cause to worry until some distant future eon, the people figured, and The Coin concurred. After the jury of long experience had had a say, the original optimist position on the inevitability of The Coin's technology had proven out.
"The Numismatic Age Has Dawned!" the news media declared.
Then were there announced 'Golden Age' launch parties in the hills and in the newly repaired streets and amphitheatres, and the people did rejoice like never before, throwing off their inhibitions with their Night clothes and running near-naked and long-shadowed in the ever-morning light. History had become a closed circle, and every scroller had a codex for its conquest in hand. And 'soon', in the scheme of things, near the same part of the horizon from whence that great, slow, fiery orb had just freed its last limb and now climbed into the sky, there arose a second sun.
"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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