The Setting
How it started
After Fall - Lore Bible · 02 Sep 2026 · 19 min read
The world did not end when the dead began walking. For a while, people believed that was the end. They watched hospitals overflow, watched soldiers fire into crowds that refused to stay dead, watched entire neighbourhoods sealed behind concrete and fire. Governments appeared on television promising containment until there was no television left. Cities lost electricity one district at a time. Water stopped coming through pipes. Food stopped arriving at stores. The dead became a problem, then a fact of life, and eventually just another thing people learned to avoid. What finally killed the old world was not the infection. It was the realization that nobody was coming to fix anything. There would be no cure announced on the radio. No army large enough to reclaim the country. No government capable of feeding millions of people forever. Civilization did not collapse in a single night. It simply became smaller every day, until one morning people realized they were no longer citizens of a country. They were survivors of whatever happened to be behind the nearest wall.
The city survived because abandoning it was impossible. Too many people remained. Too much infrastructure still existed to simply walk away from. There were buildings, roads, reservoirs, warehouses, hospitals, generators, government offices and thousands of homes. The city had everything required for civilization except the civilization itself. So the remaining authorities began securing what they could. Roads were blocked. Districts were walled. Checkpoints appeared. The infected were pushed outside wherever possible, though outside quickly became a meaningless word. Some places were safer than others. Some had water. Some had land capable of growing food. Some had warehouses full of equipment. Some had government infrastructure that could still be defended. The people did what people always do when survival becomes scarce. They organized themselves around what was useful.
The Blocks were born from that usefulness. They were never meant to be a beautiful new political system. Nobody sat in a room and designed a perfect society after the Fall. The city was simply divided according to what could still sustain life. Block A controlled the most productive agricultural land that could be defended. Block D controlled access to water and the machinery necessary to keep it moving. Block C possessed much of the surviving administrative infrastructure: government buildings, communication facilities, old institutional networks and enough defensible structures to become the center of Authority. Block B had something less glamorous but equally valuable. It had housing. Planned urban colonies, dense residential structures, apartments and streets designed for thousands of ordinary people before the world ended. When millions became thousands and thousands became desperate, empty homes became infrastructure.
At first, the Blocks were simply locations. Then they became jurisdictions. Then identities. A person born in one Block could spend their entire life hearing stories about the others without ever seeing them. Trade between the Blocks became regulated. Movement became regulated. Eventually even the people themselves became regulated. The Authority justified it as necessity. And perhaps, in the beginning, it was. You cannot distribute food to a starving population without knowing how many mouths exist. You cannot maintain a wall if everyone believes defending it is someone else's responsibility. You cannot preserve electricity when a city has become a collection of broken generators and dying machines. Order required counting. Counting required records. Records required offices. Offices required authority. Somewhere along that process, survival stopped being the purpose of the system and became the system's excuse for everything it wanted to become.
The Authority did not call its hierarchy a class system. Class systems belonged to the old world, they said. This was Worthiness. Every citizen possessed a measurable value based on service, education, usefulness, family history, disciplinary record and loyalty. The exact calculation was known only to the departments responsible for calculating it. That was convenient. Worthiness determined almost everything. The amount of food a household received. The quality of their housing. Their access to medicine. Their work assignments. Their ability to travel. Their right to reproduce. Their children's educational opportunities. Even the amount of space they were allowed to occupy while sleeping.
A home was no longer something a person owned. It was an allocation. A family could spend twenty years living in the same apartment and still not possess a single brick of it. The Authority owned the building, the room, the bed, the electricity entering the wall and the water entering the tap. A high-ranking official might occupy an entire house that once belonged to a family of six. An educated technician with valuable skills might receive a private room for himself and his spouse. Below them were workers sharing apartments with other families. Below them were people sleeping in converted offices, schools, warehouses and underground halls. In some parts of Block B, houses designed for a family of four held more than a hundred people. Beds were stacked against walls. Corridors became sleeping spaces. Kitchens disappeared beneath makeshift partitions. Privacy became an old-world luxury people described to children who had never experienced it.
And because a bed was an allocation, it could be revoked. There were families who returned home to find their names removed from the registry outside their door. There were workers whose service rating had fallen and whose rooms had been reassigned before they returned from their shift. There were old people moved out of housing because a younger worker was considered more valuable to the city. People learned not to become emotionally attached to furniture. A chair could belong to you for fifteen years and disappear because someone higher in the hierarchy needed somewhere to sit.
Food worked the same way. Everything worked the same way. Ration was not merely food. Ration was life measured into portions. Water, medicine, fuel, electricity, clothing, housing space, transportation permits, batteries, tools and sometimes even information were distributed through systems of entitlement. Every citizen possessed an account, though the word account suggested something cleaner than what actually existed. People waited in queues that began before sunrise. Entire streets outside distribution offices became temporary settlements every morning. Mothers brought stools. Old men carried bottles to urinate in because leaving the line meant losing their position. Children slept against their parents' legs. People memorized the habits of the clerks behind the windows because knowing which employee took longer breaks could determine whether you received food that day.
The worst part was that reaching the front of the queue did not guarantee anything. A shipment might be delayed. A record might be missing. A supervisor might decide the day's allocation had been reached. The office could simply close. There were people who had waited six hours only to watch a metal shutter come down while they stood three positions away from the window. They would return the next morning and begin again. Sometimes the Authority called this inefficiency. Sometimes corruption. Sometimes an unfortunate consequence of limited resources. Nobody called it what it had become: another form of power. A person who controls the speed at which another person eats eventually controls far more than their hunger.
Naturally, people created ways around it.
The grey economy did not emerge because people were inherently criminal. It emerged because bureaucracy created gaps large enough for human beings to crawl through. Ration Credit Companies appeared throughout the Blocks. They began as small operations run by people with connections inside distribution offices. A worker with an urgent medical requirement could sell his future ration entitlement to receive something immediately. Someone else could purchase the delayed entitlement and collect more later. Soon companies began offering services: immediate ration advances, queue representation, document correction, transfer acceleration, family emergency credits. They took cuts from every transaction. Some were legitimate enough to possess offices and printed documents. Others operated from basements. A woman might surrender three months of future food entitlement because her child needed medicine today. A man might sell his heating allocation to purchase a forged travel permit. People accumulated debt not in money, but in the number of days they would remain hungry in the future.
Currency still existed in fragments, but it had lost its authority. A person could possess a bag full of old notes and still fail to acquire a loaf of bread. Value had returned to usefulness. Fuel. Ammunition. Medicine. Batteries. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Machinery. Information. Human labour. A mechanic capable of repairing a water pump could live better than a man who once owned three companies. A doctor might receive privileges unavailable to an old-world millionaire. Education had become one of the strangest forms of wealth. There were not enough educated people left to replace those who died. Engineers became valuable. Lawyers became valuable. Technicians became valuable. Teachers became valuable. But education alone was not enough. You had to be useful to the Authority, and usefulness could disappear the moment someone more convenient appeared.
The poor still entertained themselves. This was one of the things the old world would have misunderstood about the new one. Poverty did not remove the need for pleasure. It made pleasure more important. There were gambling rooms hidden beneath ration offices. Illegal fighting pits. Alcohol distilled from whatever could ferment. Makeshift cinemas powered by stolen generators. Men betting food credits on card games. Women trading clothing and cosmetics smuggled from abandoned districts. Musicians playing instruments repaired so many times they barely resembled their original shape. People danced in basements while the infected wandered somewhere beyond the walls. Children gathered around old televisions when someone managed to restore power for a few hours. Humanity did not become noble after the Fall. It became itself more honestly.
The children inherited none of the nostalgia their parents carried. To them, the world had always been walls, ration cards and armed guards. They knew the old world only through stories. Some children grew up inside Parliament compounds, where officials still had access to books, education, sports grounds and occasional electricity. They learned history from sanitized records and played games their parents had scavenged from the ruins. Other children learned to recognize the sound of an empty cooking pot. They knew which ration offices were less cruel. They knew how to sleep without occupying too much space. Some could identify a valuable piece of scrap before they could read. The difference between the children of the powerful and the children of the poor was not intelligence. It was imagination. One group was taught to imagine what they might become. The other was taught to imagine what could be taken from them.
Birth became another resource problem. The Authority could not feed unlimited mouths, and so reproduction became regulated. Citizens required approval to have children. Approval depended on Worthiness, housing availability, food projections and service records. Unauthorized pregnancies existed, of course. Everything forbidden continued to exist. Some families hid children for years. Others registered them through forged documents. Some paid enormous debts to have records altered. The poor joked that making a child was free but keeping one required government approval. Nobody found the joke particularly funny when the inspectors arrived.
For those who had no Worthiness, the system possessed another category: labour. A citizen could lose privileges without technically becoming a prisoner. Their housing could be revoked. Their rations reduced. Their work assignment changed. They could be sent into cleaning crews, waste processing, corpse disposal or infrastructure repair. The Authority rarely called it punishment. Punishment suggested wrongdoing. They called it reassignment. A useful word. It allowed a person to lose everything without anyone admitting they had been sentenced to anything.
Death created its own economy. The decomposers worked where others refused to go. They entered buildings filled with bodies, searched abandoned vehicles, processed the dead and examined infected corpses for anything still valuable. Clothing could be cleaned. Metal could be reused. Jewellery could be traded. Watches, tools, identification documents, keys and personal belongings passed through their hands before entering official inventories. Naturally, not everything reached the inventory. A decomposer could discover a gold ring in the morning and his supervisor might never know it existed. Entire grey networks developed around the possessions of dead people. A dead man's wedding ring might travel through five hands before ending up around the neck of someone gambling in Block B.
Beyond the walls existed a world the Authority could not fully describe. Maps from before the Fall had become increasingly useless. Roads were blocked. Bridges had collapsed. Entire settlements had vanished. Other cities had survived under other systems. Some had authorities more organized than the Blocks. Some were controlled by military remnants. Some were ruled by families, religious groups, criminal organizations or people who had simply accumulated enough weapons and followers to call themselves governments. There were deserters: former Authority personnel, soldiers, scavengers and workers who had escaped with knowledge of the system they once served. There were loners who refused every organized society and survived between ruins. There were communities that called themselves the beginning of a new age, thinkers who believed the Fall had proven that governments themselves were diseases. Some preached freedom while robbing scavengers on the roads. Some genuinely built settlements outside every known authority. Some were worse than the infected.
Nobody knew how much existed beyond the territories marked on official maps. The Authority preferred uncertainty. It was easier to control a population that believed the wall separated civilization from madness. The truth was more complicated. There were other civilizations outside. Other economies. Other governments. Other kinds of oppression. And sometimes, something genuinely better. But knowledge travelled slowly, usually through people who had seen things and survived long enough to return.
That responsibility belonged largely to the scavengers.
Scavengers were the veins of the city. They went where the Authority could not. Abandoned towns, warehouses, petrol stations, hospitals, factories, military facilities, residential districts swallowed by vegetation, highways filled with rusting vehicles. They retrieved fuel, machinery, medicine, tools, electrical components, food that had somehow survived, weapons when they found them and thousands of smaller objects that became valuable only because civilization no longer manufactured replacements. They also brought back unnecessary things. Entertainment was a ration too, even if nobody wrote that on official documents. A working projector, an old film reel, musical equipment, a bottle of imported liquor, a carton of cigarettes. The city had learned that a population could survive without pleasure, but it could not be controlled indefinitely without providing some of it.
The infected were dangerous, but experienced scavengers feared humans more. The dead did not negotiate. They did not ask what was inside your vehicle. They did not follow you back to your family. Deserters did. Rival authorities did. Loners watched the roads because they knew scavengers returned carrying things worth stealing. A scavenger expedition leaving the city might carry weapons, fuel and equipment, but an expedition returning carried something more valuable: proof that the journey had succeeded. Trucks loaded with supplies became moving targets. Every abandoned checkpoint could contain an ambush. Every unfamiliar radio signal could belong to someone waiting for them. Sometimes scavengers returned with half their original number. Sometimes they returned without the supplies and had to explain why.
Nobody simply applied to become a scavenger.
The Authority understood human attachment better than it understood loyalty. A desperate man with nothing could disappear. A man who owned nothing had nothing to fear losing. So before the Authority sent a scavenger beyond the walls, it gave him something worth returning to.
Scavenger candidates received privileges. Better housing. Better food. More private space. Their service records improved. Some were given access to social programs unavailable to ordinary workers. They were introduced to women considered compatible. The system called them partnerships when it was feeling civilized. In reality, the Authority had entire departments dedicated to pairing useful people with useful people. A scavenger candidate might spend months believing his life had finally improved. He would move from a room shared with strangers into an apartment with a door that locked. He would eat meat occasionally. He would sleep beside someone he loved. He would begin planning things again. Perhaps a child would be approved. Perhaps one would be born anyway.
And then his tenure would arrive.
By that time, leaving was no longer simple. Outside the wall was dangerous, but staying behind was impossible. The apartment belonged to the Authority. The food belonged to the Authority. His wife's status was connected to his service. His child's future was calculated against his performance. He could desert, of course. People did. But deserters rarely disappeared alone. The Authority did not need to threaten a scavenger directly when his entire life had already been placed on the table.
The city did not chain scavengers to the walls. It taught them to chain themselves.
The lawyer understood all of this better than most people. He had spent his life reading the language the Authority used to disguise its intentions. Before the Fall, law had been a profession. After the Fall, it became something closer to archaeology. Old legal concepts survived in fragments. Contracts still existed. Property disputes still existed despite almost nobody truly owning property. Crimes still required definitions. Debts required witnesses. Death required documentation. The Authority needed people capable of making its decisions sound legitimate, and the lawyer was useful enough to survive comfortably but not useful enough to become important.
He was not a hero. He had represented people he knew were guilty. He had helped families navigate the bureaucracy while accepting payment from those who could afford him. He knew officials in Block B. He knew people in the Grey Market. He knew which crimes were forgiven when committed by the right person and which mistakes could destroy someone who had no connections. He had seen the city from above and below. He had eaten at tables where people discussed population projections while drinking something imported from outside the walls, and he had stood in ration queues beside people who had not eaten properly in days.
He survived because he understood that morality had become expensive.
The journey began with a package.
A member of the Authority needed something retrieved. The lawyer was approached because of his connections. It was not an official request at first. The package had supposedly passed through the Grey Market before disappearing. Someone had stolen it. Someone else claimed to have sold it. Names appeared and disappeared. By the time the lawyer understood the situation, the request had stopped sounding like a favour.
He searched Block B. He spoke to traders, smugglers, ration brokers and people who survived by knowing things they should not know. Nothing. Eventually the information pointed beyond the walls. A group carrying the package had been seen moving through territory contested by deserters and another faction whose name changed depending on who you asked. The Authority needed someone familiar with the package, someone capable of identifying it, and someone expendable enough that their death would not create administrative complications.
The lawyer was attached to a scavenger expedition.
They were not soldiers. Soldiers protected the city. Scavengers were sent away from it.
The journey was longer than anyone expected. Roads had become traps. Buildings became temporary shelters and then killing grounds. The infected followed sound, but people followed opportunity. They lost supplies. They were forced to abandon vehicles. At one point they discovered evidence of another group and spent an entire night without lighting a fire because nobody knew whether the strangers had continued moving or were watching them from somewhere beyond the trees. There were moments when the lawyer believed they would not return. Moments when returning stopped being a plan and became a story people told themselves because the alternative was too frightening to consider.
They found the package because someone had paid for it with blood.
It had changed hands. Deserters had taken it. Someone had taken it from them. A confrontation became an ambush. An ambush became something worse. By the time the scavengers recovered it, the expedition was no longer the group that had left the city. People were injured. People were gone. One of them had spent the journey talking about returning to his wife and the child he had barely known long enough to watch grow. Another had carried a photograph inside a waterproof pouch and checked it every night before sleeping. There had been arguments, fear, hunger and the particular silence that follows violence when nobody wants to look at what has been left behind.
And still they carried the package.
It was sealed tightly. Heavy enough to matter. Important enough that multiple groups had killed for it. Important enough for an Authority member to force civilians beyond the walls. Important enough for scavengers to die retrieving it.
Nobody knew what was inside.
The Authority member had never said.
They carried it back through the same broken world they had barely survived crossing. Every kilometre became more difficult because now they had something worth protecting. By the time the walls appeared again, the lawyer had begun to understand why scavengers sometimes returned and refused to speak about what they had seen. There were experiences that did not become memories properly. They remained somewhere inside the body instead.
Inside the city, the surviving scavengers were separated for medical examination and debriefing. The lawyer remained with the package longer than he was supposed to. It was waiting to be collected. That was all. Another piece of paperwork. Another delivery. Another transaction between people powerful enough to request things and people weak enough to retrieve them.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he cut it open.
The first thing he saw was the cigarettes.
There were entire cartons of them, packed carefully beneath layers of protective wrapping. Imported brands. Perfectly preserved. The kind of thing that had become almost mythical in the Blocks. Things people occasionally heard about but rarely saw. Things traded between powerful people behind closed doors.
For a few seconds, he did not understand.
Then he removed another layer.
There were bottles beneath them.
Liquor.
He stood there with the package open in front of him, surrounded by the smell of dust, dried blood and whatever remained on his clothes from the journey outside. Somewhere beyond the room, people were processing the dead. Somewhere a scavenger's family still did not know he would not be coming home. Somewhere a three-month-old child would eventually grow old enough to ask why their father had left and why he never returned.
He looked down at the cigarettes again.
Then at the bottles.
And understood what they had gone outside for.
To be contd.