It is said that when empires fall, they do not do so in silence—they die with a groan, a howl, a great and tragic wailing that echoes across the centuries. So it was with the Tiberian Empire. And it was Silouan the Wise, the last great scholar of a world that once thought itself eternal, who bore witness to its twilight. With trembling hand and tear-filled eyes, he inked the final testament of a dying civilization—a lamentation for a world undone.
"Let it be known," he wrote, "that in the final days, hunger stalked the land like a beast unchained. In the cities, there was nothing left. Not grain, not roots, not mercy. The rats were skewered on iron spits, and beloved pets were torn from their owners’ arms and consumed by maddened, starving mobs. I have heard it said—though perhaps it is best left unconfirmed—that some, driven by despair, ingested poisonous herbs, choosing a swift death over slow decay. The toll was beyond reckoning. It was as though divine judgment had descended upon the Earth, to scour it clean of corruption and birth it anew beneath the gaze of an angry God."
Among the first to succumb to despair was Petronius, Imperial Governor of Lorum. Upon learning that thirty-seven members of his household—including his wife and four children—had perished from the plague, he took his own life in his quarters. The guards found him hanging from the rafters, his final letter drenched in tears and ink.
The mighty Alexander Zenos, once the wealthiest magnate in the Empire and the power behind a dozen thrones, suffered a crueler fate. When his palatial estate fell, the desperate mob tore through its golden gates and devoured him and his family alive. Flesh was meat; names and legacies meant nothing anymore.
Not even the Church was spared its shame. Bishop Peter of Naranj, once hailed as a living saint, fled his city under cover of night, abandoning both altar and flock. His carriage, laden with stolen food and holy relics, was found overturned days later on a forest road, stripped bare. The bishop’s body was never recovered. Some whispered he was dragged into the woods and torn apart; others claimed he lived on, cloaked in rags, hiding from the eyes of men and God alike.
To the south, the ancient city of Peron, home to the Empire’s largest mint, was left silent. Its forges cold, its artisans gone. Once, gold flowed from Peron like water from a spring—now it lay abandoned, a mausoleum of melted coins and broken hammers.
In the west, the city of Arbelon, jewel of trade and commerce, endured—but barely. Of its teeming multitudes, fewer than one in ten remained. Its salvation, said Silouan, was the fish. The nearby waters, rich with life, gave the survivors just enough to endure. But even there, the silence of empty streets haunted every corner.
Revlon, the fabled City of Grain, was not so fortunate. Called “The City of Abundance,” it had once fed millions from its endless silos. In its prime, its wealth rivaled Elmeron, the imperial seat itself. But Revlon was burned—razed to the soil by those who had once depended on its bounty. Its golden fields, once praised in song, now lay rotting in hues of reddish green. The stench was otherworldly. Carried by the wind for leagues in every direction, it caused even the strongest men to vomit uncontrollably. Shepherds abandoned their flocks, traders turned away from the roads, and no bird dared fly over the cursed valley. The earth itself seemed to mourn.
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A patchwork of barbarian tribes—scattered, savage, once divided by blood feuds—came together under one banner to claim the jewel of the Arcadians. They made Sarmak the capital of their newborn kingdom, calling it Diora. The summer palace that belonged to the Imperial family became a residance of barbarian cheftans. Some said that the barbarians had beheaded all the statues of emperors. The temples stand desecrated, their relics looted or cast aside, and the great Library of the Dawn—home to thousands of scrolls and histories—was said to have been burned for warmth during the first winter.
Sarmak endures, yes—but only as a ghost. A shadow of its former glory, a memory draped in foreign banners.
Even the heartlands fell. The province of Lydia, iron womb of the Empire, which had fueled the forges of war and progress for over a thousand years, was seized by the Kaluk barbarians. The smithies were silent now. The mines, abandoned. The Kaluk, unchallenged, now made their homes among the rusted tools of a dead civilization.
The Kaluk, the Horse-Lords of the East, and their subject tribes did not build upon the Empire’s bones—they picked them clean. In Sarmak, the barbarian chieftain Varek the Bloody-Handed held court in the summer palace, his warriors feasting in halls where Arcadian emperors had once dined on porcelain and silver. The statues of old rulers were toppled, their faces smashed, their inscriptions defaced.
Yet even the conquerors could not escape the shadow of what had been. Varek’s son, a boy of ten, was said to have found a fragment of an imperial scroll in the ruins of the Library of the Dawn. Unable to read it, he brought it to his father, who laughed and cast it into the fire. But the boy watched the embers rise into the night, as if chasing some long-dead dream.
"Never before," wrote Silouan, "even in the most distant myths, were there so many kings and emperors, and so few peasants left to till the land. I fear that all the wisdom we have gathered, all the lore etched in parchment and marble, shall be swept away like sand before a rising tide."
He mourned not just the living, but the memory of the Empire. Paintings torn from palace walls, mosaics shattered beneath boots and fire, libraries—once home to a thousand lifetimes of knowledge—burned until only ash remained. Academies razed. The voices of poets and philosophers silenced.
“Shall there be any left to read what I have written? Shall any soul remember that once, we were wise?”
And so he wrote—by candlelight in the ruins of a scriptorium, amid the echo of a world falling into shadow. He wrote not in hope, but in sorrow. His was not a chronicle of triumph, but of warning. A whisper to a distant future, if it should ever come.
