Power has a way of accelerating.

Like a snowflake falling at the top of a mountain.

It gathers and rolls until it is too large to handle and eventually stopped by an

immovable force. It explodes. This is how grandparents explain the beginning of the concentric states to the children at their feet.

A millennium ago, something began to expand. It is lost in the mouths of storytellers where the

horde came from exactly. Some say they crawled out of the very ground.

Others say they were just men twisted and

powered by their own desires. But every retelling remembers their mouths, rows of

craggy teeth, like the mouths of caves, barely concealed in their

slacken jaws.

The horde sacked cities, poisoned rivers, burned and slashed and raised whatever they could get their hands on.

At this point, the elders would throw more wood on the fire to warm the room.

It fits well with what happens next.

The heroes gather to fight the monsters off, each champion embodying their own specific

shade of goodness. At the foot of what we now call Mount Horizon, in dramatic fashion was the final stand.

The champions, through teamwork,

sheer force of will and well-timed a divine intervention,

fight the evil off, they are vanquished, and we began again, independent

and unified a fellowship of cities.

This ending, the grandparents think when they tuck the children into bed,

is much more satisfying than what actually happened. The decades of infighting, the invocations of gods no one had seen since the

reckoning, the sour compromise of a confederacy of city states.

...