Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Seven Lifetimes

To stand here on the rutted gravel road of what once was railroad avenue is to see the whole of the town at a glance. What remains anyway. In time only name and memory.  

The foundations of the old elevators are still visible through the grass, but the tracks were pulled up years ago. The highway is there to the north, and it will take you anywhere that matters. Seven people remain in town. If they linked hands they would barely make it across the width of the old hotel, rotting away and waiting to be condemned. But each of those seven would have known someone who walked that street a lifetime ago – let us be conservative and count that 70 years – even if they could not recall it themselves.  

A small station stands across from the hotel, a platform really, but trains come every day. Though the town is diminished from its height before the fire in ‘28, there is still a school busy with children, a post office, a general store, a church and more. Electricity and running water arrived not too many years ago. Everyone walking those streets will remember what life was like without it. There is nothing to suggest to them the steady diminishment that will follow, the dwindling of the town with the arrival of the highway and the rail line going. 

None of those who walk those streets were in that place a lifetime ago. They are all newcomers to those parts and the town was born, flourished and died its slow death over less than two lifetimes. But some would have been in these larger territories their whole lives and would have encountered the combatants of the great rebellion that roiled the land north and east. They would have passed through these parts trying to rally more of their proud nations to them. Their failure meant the end of the Iron Confederacy and that the treaties signed ten years before would now rule their lives. 

They would have remembered, or known those who could, a lifetime further back when the Iron Confederacy was the great power in these parts, at the centre of the trade between the European fur men and the other Nations of the Plains. Those traders were fully present throughout the territories by then, but they likely couldn’t have imagined how quickly the balance of power would shift between them. The bison herds still roamed and the pox and grippe had yet to wreak their full havoc. 

None of those then would have been able to conceive life without the Europeans presence, but they would have known some who, a lifetime before, had never encountered one. They would have understood the provenance of the guns and pots and axes and knives that gave their confederacy its name, but in those days the traders did not venture far from Bay and the northern rivers that fed into it and the Confederacy was in its ascendance.  

Those then would know someone who could recall a lifetime before when the Company had not yet settled on the Bay and they had to rely on the generosity of others, at poor prices, to acquire those iron goods. And those people would have parents or cousins alive a lifetime previous when the existence of those traders would have been a tale told fifth hand. A strange and unbelievable tale.  

Horses would have come north by then, through the trading networks of the Plains, transforming their lives, the world suddenly much smaller. They could follow the bison herds with ease, move to better territories and build the alliances that would become the Iron Confederacy. A lifetime before and all that came after would have been unimaginable. They would have walked the plains much as they had for seven lifetimes prior to that. The next seven would see worlds made and unmade.