Did something really silly this week, a perfect embodiment of The Motern Method, p. 55 “Wouldn’t it be funny if…?”
Enjoy! Or don’t… I can’t make you love me.
The king was dead. If Vanessa were any normal woman, raised under normal circumstances, she might have mourned, but her father, King Miknali the Twelfth, was practically a stranger to her. After doing his duty, twenty-eight years ago, to sire an heir, he had little, to no, interaction with her. He might as well have been a stranger.
Even her tutelage in the responsibilities of the, mostly ceremonial, monarchy, were handled by servants, rather than by her father himself. He was little more to her than a meal ticket to a cushier life.
She was barely worried about the task ahead of her. Show up at specific public events, wave to the crowd, and recite a few prepared words at the Krismuss Ceremony in Desembir. Life on easy street.
“Your majesty.” A sullen servant began. “It is time to invoke the blessing of the Sacred Documents.”
“Ah yes, the mythical Sacred Documents.” Vanessa said dismissively. “Let’s get it over with.”
Down a long set of stairs, through a series of dark tunnels, and into a vault, far from the public view, sat the Sacred Documents said to be the source of her family’s power dating back almost six centuries, following “The Cleansing”.
The documents sat in a fanciful replica of the, supposed, original reliquary, though none living have record of what the original container looked like. This new one had translucent glass sides, with a gold plated frame holding it all together. Topped with a blued steel lid, and sealed with a series of complicated locking mechanisms.
‘Ridiculous’, Vanessa thought. ‘A hammer to that glass and you’re inside anyway.’
Within the container sat the original Sacred Documents, weathered, worn, barely legible, even if one could read the old form of Inklesh. At the bottom of the container were the crumbled pieces of the original container, some form of synthetic material, theorized to have somehow been made from a liquid pumped from the ground.
The content of the Sacred Documents had long been transcribed to new parchment, and later electronic records, in a modern language that people could understand, though few in the modern day really understood what the original markings meant.
The servant handed Vanessa a set of pristine gloves. “Don the gloves and then lift the Sacred Documents gently.”
She did as he asked and lifted the documents, flakes of which came off as she lifted them.
“Recite after me.” He began. And she did exactly as he asked.
“With the Sacred Documents in hand, showing me the clear and righteous path, I, Queen Miknali the Ninth, shall guide our people to a prosperous future.”
The actual oath was quite a bit longer, but that was the gist of it.
Vanessa was no more, she was the now the queen, and like all queens and kings before her, she took the name Miknali, as was written on the original first page of Sacred Documents.
There would be more ceremony, including an official coronation, but for all intents and purposes she was now ruler of her people and the vast lands they inhabited.
As she gently placed the Sacred Documents into their ornate coffer, she couldn’t help but wonder where they came from. They originated before The Cleansing. Who wrote them? Why? In the face of the complete collapse of civilization, did they put them in a safe place, so future generations would find them and learn from their wisdom?
No one would ever know the answer to that question.
Five Hundred and Sixty-Seven Years Earlier
2014 C.E. by the reckoning of the people of that time
“No, we don’t need that in the new car. We have the map program on our phones.” Beckie said as she took the giant road atlas from her husband’s hand and put it in a clear plastic Rubbermaid container of other books to be donated.
“But what if we don’t have signal? What if we’re in rural Wyoming, or something, and need to know where to go?” Mark asked as he rescued the 2006 Rand McNally Road Atlas from the bin.
“We keep following the one road that goes through Wyoming until we get to someplace with signal.” Becky playfully scoffed.
“Fine! Fine! You win. It’s way out of date anyway.” Mark said with a fake mournful tone, placing the atlas back in the plastic bin. “Does Rand McNally even still make road atlases? How do they stay in business?”
The bin sat in the basement for a few months, never making it to the book reseller, before getting stuffed into the crawlspace when the Christmas decorations went back in at the start of January. There it sat, for almost twenty years, before the bombs fell and society as they knew it, ended.
Mark and Beckie’s house was built on a hill, with the crawl space well below ground. The blast wave toppled their house and firmly buried the box of books in wet soil, creating an airtight seal, that would preserve the contents for another ten years before a scavenger stumbled across it.
The atlas changed hands a few times, along with a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, Ready Player One, Eat Pray Love, the novelization of Star Wars: Episode II, and some vegetarian cookbooks that had little value in a savage society that routinely would feast on the flesh of their fellow man.
Finally, it found its way into the hands of someone who recognized its value. With it she knew the location of key pre-cataclysm resources, like power plants, reservoirs, etc. She was even able to ascertain good locations for farming, that might have been spared nuclear fallout. Most importantly, she knew exactly how to get to these places using the old roads.
She never declared herself a monarch, nor did her children, who continued using the atlas to build their new society. It was her great grandchild who decided he would king, and retroactively declared his three predecessors to also be kings and queens of their new, prosperous, land.
He and his successors would take the mystical name from the Sacred Documents that lead his great-grandmother to the promised land, McNally.
A few weeks ago we were on a road trip, and I got nostalgic for road atlases. I wondered if they even still made them. Of course they do, and of course I had to get the latest one just to have it for old time’s sake. Then I had the weird idea of the apocalypse happening and how valuable a paper map would be, given that so much of what we do is digital now. How important would that person be who found an in-tact road atlas? Sure, the roads would now be overgrown, or maybe even too damaged for vehicles, but they still are long evenly paved places that take you to various points of interest.
It’s true there would be no shortage of paper maps floating about, in the hands of all kinds of people if society collapsed tomorrow, but it’s funnier to think that one person found the only in-tact map left and build an empire from that knowledge.
Armchair Screenwriter 