Seat of Accounts

More about Seat of Accounts

They call it a fortress only in hindsight. In its own time, it was a ledger made of stone
and fire—a place where routes converged, margins hardened into law, and distance
itself learned who held it. The Merchant Princes did not arrive as raiders. They
arrived with contracts, escorts, and the quiet arithmetic of supply. What followed was
inevitable. Trade required protection. Protection required position. Position, once
taken, required permanence. Thus a city rose where the crust had already split,
anchoring itself above a wound in the world that could never be closed.

From orbit, the chasm reads as spectacle: lava coursing like molten coin, light
spilling upward to gild the towers above. From the inside, it is infrastructure. Heat is
harvested. Power is constant. The abyss serves as both moat and reminder—of the
cost of extraction, and of the penalty for contesting ownership once it has been
enforced. Fleets idle on the flats below not as invaders, but as petitioners, waiting
their turn beneath banners that speak softly of tariffs, exclusivity, and safe passage.

History would later argue over whether this place was piracy refined into
governance, or commerce stripped of pretense. The Princes never bothered to
answer. They ruled by continuity: ships kept moving, accounts kept balancing, and
rivals kept their distance. Empires rose and fell elsewhere, but this fief endured,
incandescent and unmoved. In the far future, scholars would agree on only one point
—the moment this fortress was completed, the line between trade and conquest
finally disappeared, and no one who mattered pretended otherwise again.