From Karad Vell, Concerning an Imperial Road

Today I walked a portion of the old Imperial Road beneath Karad Vell. The term “road” is inadequate. At its height, it was one branch of a subterranean transport network extending across much of the continent, broad enough in places for six wagons abreast and engineered with drainage, ventilation, rest stations, and distance markers cut directly into the stone. Whole generations of Dwarves travelled through these passages under the assumption that the Empire surrounding them was permanent. It was not.

Most of the route is still structurally sound, which is very Dwarven. The state that commissioned it has been dead for several thousand years, but the drains continue to work.

At one junction we found an old sign carved into the wall indicating distances to three provincial capitals. One is now a ruin. Another lies beneath a modern city whose inhabitants no longer use its original name, and the third sits across an international border which did not exist when the sign was cut. My guide, a local archivist, translated the inscription for me even though I could read most of it myself. He then traced one of the place-names with his fingers and remarked that his grandmother had been born there before the district was abandoned after a mine collapse.

There is an odd quality to ruins that remain useful. One expects the past to decay politely into archaeology. Instead, carts still pass over stones laid by an emperor no living government recognises. Merchants rest beneath arches bearing erased imperial seals, and modern surveyors consult measurements made by officials whose titles have not existed for thirty centuries. We like to imagine history as a succession of completed things, and it is usually more untidy than that.