The World That Remains

The oldest surviving Vahrisch phrase for the inhabited world is Vahrdren. The usual translation—the World That Remains—is convenient rather than exact. The older word vahr can mean an enclosure, a vessel, a bounded place, or something kept within limits; dren carries the sense of what survives after loss, what is left when other things are gone, or what remains available to those still living. The name therefore does not describe a planet, a kingdom, or even a continent. It describes the totality of the world as its inhabitants understand it.

To a person born in Vahrdren, the world is not divided between land and sky in the way old speculative philosophers sometimes imagine. There is the Drenn, the immense continuous surface upon which people live, and there is the Hadr, the black vault overhead. Between them stand cities, forests, reservoirs, mountains, cultivated plains, industrial regions, railway lines, chasms, ruined settlements, and machinery older than any surviving record. The Drenn can be crossed by road or rail, mapped by surveyors, farmed, mined, fortified, flooded, and built upon. The Hadr cannot. It simply hangs above everything, black and apparently without end.

No sun rises over Vahrdren. No moon crosses the Hadr. No stars mark seasons or directions. The light by which civilization lives is artificial, produced by immense ancient machines known as Kaelkarne. Their radiance, vaer, warms the land, nourishes crops, keeps water from freezing, and allows ordinary life to continue. Around the strongest Kaelkarne, cities have stood for centuries. Between them run roads, railways, power conduits, farms, settlements, and institutions whose continued existence depends upon the maintenance of systems inherited from people whose names are no longer known.

Most people do not spend their days contemplating this arrangement. A railway clerk still worries about late trains. A physician still complains about poor sanitation. Merchants argue over contracts, children attend schools, couples marry, laborers organize, politicians make promises, and crowded restaurants remain open long after the regulated lamps have dimmed for the artificial night. Vahrdren is strange only when compared to a world its inhabitants have never seen.

What concerns scholars is not that Vahrdren is unusual. It is that too much of it cannot be adequately explained.

Nobody knows who built the oldest machinery beneath the Drenn. Nobody has demonstrated how far downward the world extends. Deep shafts have reached miles below inhabited ground without finding any universal foundation. Certain geological layers contain worked metal where stone should exist. Entire buried complexes have been discovered beneath cities whose oldest records insist that nothing previously stood there.

The same uncertainty applies to the edges of mapped civilization. Surveyors distinguish between the stable illuminated territories of the Vaeren, the increasingly unreliable frontier of the Selvael, and the largely unknown darkness called Ulvael. These are not political borders. They describe degrees of dependable light, settlement, geography, and knowledge. Roads that are ordinary in the Vaeren may become difficult in Selvael. Beyond the furthest dependable lamps, maps themselves become less trustworthy.

Older religious texts offer a simple description:

The Drenn is the floor. The Hadr is the lid.

Scholars generally regard the line as metaphor.

Most also admit that no better explanation has been proven.