Of all the cities raised in Meirune, none has been more generously described than Avinesse. Merchants praise her markets, soldiers her walls, priests her cathedrals, and kings her palaces. Each has found the city admirable in precisely those matters from which his own importance takes its source.

The truth is less orderly.

Avinesse began not as a capital, but as a convenient place to cross the Vierleme. By the eighteenth century Before the Shattering, a modest settlement had gathered beneath the walls of a fortress then known as the Château de Vertes, now Fort Corwine. Ferrymen, millers, fishermen, carters, and traders followed the soldiers. A market appeared beyond the gates. Then workshops. Then warehouses. Then houses enough that someone eventually thought it necessary to call the place a town.

Thus Avinesse began, as many cities do: because people found it useful to meet there.

Its fortunes changed dramatically in 1503 BS, when a powerful earthquake altered the course of the Vierleme and created an island near the center of the growing settlement. After twenty-three years of surveys, disputed claims, revised valuations, and several citizens refusing to surrender particularly cherished gardens, the Crown began construction of a fortified residence upon it.

The court brought nobles, servants, clerks, craftsmen, physicians, petitioners, guards, tutors, merchants, and moneylenders. The markets expanded to feed the palace, then expanded again to feed those who fed the palace. Bridges replaced ferries. Stone replaced timber. The city grew wealthy enough to become worth attacking.

Following the First Kashgari Incursion, King Émeric IV ordered the construction of the Great Walls. Their completion required seventy-two years, enormous quantities of stone, considerable royal expenditure, and rather more argument than later commemorative histories generally acknowledge. No enemy army has since taken Avinesse by direct assault.

The walls have nevertheless required repair almost continuously.

Centuries later, Avinesse became part of something far greater than Meirune itself.

The Xanathos Empire brought roads, law, standardized coinage, engineering, scholarship, and the widespread use of weircraft. Its engineers improved the city’s waterways and sewers. Weirlights illuminated its markets. Patterned machines protected granaries, raised water, and carried warnings between the river forts. Merchants arrived from across Vryea and beyond, and a dozen languages might be heard in the Grand Market on a busy day.

Generations were born for whom this order seemed less an accomplishment than a permanent condition of the world.

It was not.

The Shattering ended that age.

What precisely occurred remains disputed even now. The surviving accounts agree on little beyond the scale of the calamity. Roads failed. Rivers changed course. Weather departed from familiar patterns. Weir structures ceased to function or behaved in ways their makers had never intended. Settlements vanished from royal surveys. Communications failed across vast distances.

The Xanathos Empire did not fall in a single day. Governors continued issuing decrees. Soldiers remained at posts awaiting orders that never arrived. Taxes were collected for offices no one could reach.

Eventually, it became impossible to say where the Empire still existed.

Avinesse survived.

Its population diminished. Trade collapsed. Districts beyond the walls were abandoned. Yet the Crown retained control of the city, the lower Vierleme, and much of the surrounding country. From that surviving foundation, Meirune rebuilt.

It was during these years that memory itself became a concern of government.

Books, maps, engineering manuals, legal codes, guild rolls, correspondence, surveys, and fragments of imperial scholarship were gathered beneath the Château. Monasteries sent copies of their collections. Provincial courts forwarded judgments. Scribes rescued texts already crumbling with age. What could be preserved was preserved.

Not always willingly.

The Royal Archives grew from that effort and remain beneath the Île des Rois today.

In the centuries since, Avinesse has again become the largest city in Meirune: seat of the Crown, center of law and learning, and the great market through which the kingdom’s grain, timber, iron, wine, cloth, salt, and foreign goods pass. Its walls contain palaces and tenements, archives and prisons, schools and debtors’ courts. Scholars travel great distances to read books no longer preserved in their own lands. Merchants bargain beneath buildings older than the kingdoms from which they came.

Avinesse is sometimes offered as proof that civilization survived the Shattering.

Perhaps it did.

Historians should be cautious with such conclusions. Cities are particularly skilled at appearing permanent to the people who live within them.

We record what was built, what was promised, and what survived.

They are seldom the same thing.