Ghost of Dunneshaine
Posted: 2006-11-23 12:17am
It's been a couple of months since I've written anything fiction, or written for fun at all, so I threw this together in a spare moment just to see if I could tease out a narrative voice. It's setting is original, from several of my BESM campaigns and it might become a full-fledged short story in the next few weeks. But right now I just wanted to throw out a short piece and see what people thought.
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In the older days Dunneshaine had been a modest port of some repute. During the great ages of exploration, it had enjoyed varying degrees of infamy as a free port with all the trouble and excitement that went with the designation. Great ships often birthed there and young men from the surrounding regions would often arrive to buy or steal passage aboard the merchant ships and free vessels that passed through. As such, it was a port much more given to thriving taverns than thriving tradesmen, but the regents were never wanting for taxes, being inclined to skim directly from the docking fees instead. Nor did the King’s Navy have much dispute with the town, as its recruiting office was always full of adventurous young men for the officers, and its bars were always full of drunken old hands for the press gangs.
All told it was a pleasant and unremarkable town, but as tales are rarely told about pleasant and unremarkable towns, the astute reader may assume that the previous situation did not endure. The astute reader would, of course, be correct. Dunneshaine was abandoned, it’s citizens gone, it’s mighty docks listless, its taverns silent and empty. All it’s modest glory set untended to rot and rust. But it was not invasion, or plague, or fiery upheaval which undid this town. It was merely a shifting of the winds.
Dunneshaine sat on the waypoint of the ancient Thracia-Mondestat hyper lane. It sat at a node of three minor routes and funneled them into this great artery of trade and travel. The large, patchwork station sat amid a cluster of slowly spinning matter, large enough to create a gravitic depression, but never quite able to become a star. As such it had been able to supply many refueling needs without costly shipping measures and the depression became an easy reference point for long runs.
Then came the jump drive. Instantaneous travel from one side of the galaxy to the other. Hyperspace not only became pointless, it became impossible. As the Shracknar War came to its abrupt and unexpected conclusion, the great way stations of the Second expansion were abandoned. The ships no longer came, so the merchants and officers left. The pirates stayed a bit longer, but the station was too far from anything influential to have any use even to thieves and murderers. So it was abandoned and left adrift. It was more than three hundred years before anything lived there again, and in my younger days, I had the misfortune to meet it.
(edited for format)
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In the older days Dunneshaine had been a modest port of some repute. During the great ages of exploration, it had enjoyed varying degrees of infamy as a free port with all the trouble and excitement that went with the designation. Great ships often birthed there and young men from the surrounding regions would often arrive to buy or steal passage aboard the merchant ships and free vessels that passed through. As such, it was a port much more given to thriving taverns than thriving tradesmen, but the regents were never wanting for taxes, being inclined to skim directly from the docking fees instead. Nor did the King’s Navy have much dispute with the town, as its recruiting office was always full of adventurous young men for the officers, and its bars were always full of drunken old hands for the press gangs.
All told it was a pleasant and unremarkable town, but as tales are rarely told about pleasant and unremarkable towns, the astute reader may assume that the previous situation did not endure. The astute reader would, of course, be correct. Dunneshaine was abandoned, it’s citizens gone, it’s mighty docks listless, its taverns silent and empty. All it’s modest glory set untended to rot and rust. But it was not invasion, or plague, or fiery upheaval which undid this town. It was merely a shifting of the winds.
Dunneshaine sat on the waypoint of the ancient Thracia-Mondestat hyper lane. It sat at a node of three minor routes and funneled them into this great artery of trade and travel. The large, patchwork station sat amid a cluster of slowly spinning matter, large enough to create a gravitic depression, but never quite able to become a star. As such it had been able to supply many refueling needs without costly shipping measures and the depression became an easy reference point for long runs.
Then came the jump drive. Instantaneous travel from one side of the galaxy to the other. Hyperspace not only became pointless, it became impossible. As the Shracknar War came to its abrupt and unexpected conclusion, the great way stations of the Second expansion were abandoned. The ships no longer came, so the merchants and officers left. The pirates stayed a bit longer, but the station was too far from anything influential to have any use even to thieves and murderers. So it was abandoned and left adrift. It was more than three hundred years before anything lived there again, and in my younger days, I had the misfortune to meet it.
(edited for format)