The fire crackled and hissed under the endless starry night. The Elder circled it, predatory, unafraid, looking for his perfect moment.

Then at once, his arms spread wide, casting a shadow of a ferocious monster into the trees. “Lo! They did come!” He began, intoning the words of the Great Story.

“Across the endless sea of land they did come, perfect machines of death. Mechs and crawlers of near-divine make! Their victory all but absolute.”

He lowered his arms and his tone. “And at first they were unstoppable. Sweeping away all in their path.”

A smile crept across his lips, and a murmur went through the tribe.

“They thought we, we paltry, we dirty, we nothing, would be the same.”

He thrust his walking stick into the ground, and drew out a long line in the dirt.

“But we were not the same. We were something different. We would not let them cross our line, our river, our Mississippi.”

He pushed the hood back from his face, looking his tribesmen in their eyes.

“And now what do they all say? The poor? The downtrodden? The forgotten? They say, ‘Look to the Mississippi! The line that shall not be crossed!’”

Memphis Note
So, yeah, maybe this one’s just a tad be influenced by the Grizzlies winning tonight. Just a tad.

The Loop encircled the city, like a great snake swallowing its own tail. A snake of asphalt and concrete and rebar, littered with metal signs scrawled with strange words and numbers from the old tongue. “INTERSTATE” “40” “EXIT” and other marks that no longer had any meaning.

The city within was naught but a blasted out ruin, obliterated when the last of the superpowers raked their nuclear fury across the sky. Billions died instantly and millions more starved in the long winters that came after.

Like the roaches and the rats and the other things that knew how to scurry and hide, mankind survived into what came after. Broken, separated, but alive.

Hidden amongst those ruins was the beating heart of one of those shards of humanity. It sustained them, it purified them when they were sick, and in turn they charged themselves with its protection and upkeep.

It was the Pump, the last one in the city, its wells reaching down, deep down to where the fallout couldn’t touch. As far as they knew, it was the last clean water in the world.

So, they walked the Loop, keeping vigil on their beating heart, their font of the life.

Memphis Note
Time and time again Memphis has been noted for it’s clean, fresh, delicious water. The source of that water is a saturated level of sand, deep below the surface, nearly invulnerable to modern pollution.

She watched for the signal from the dive master. He touched his thumb to his index finger, and rolled back into the cold, brown water. She and the rest of her cohort followed suit.

They descended into the murky depths of the Mississippi Sea. She was taught that this had once been a river, one of the greatest in the world. Then the Big One came, a quake that split the continent from the Cracked Arch of Saint Louis to the Bay of Orleans, swallowing everything between.

Without the dive master, her archeological expedition would’ve never known where to look for the lost city of Memphis. The entirety of it had slid into the river, like a carpet drug across a floor. From the surface, there was no sign of anything beneath.

Below, whole city blocks remained as they were centuries ago. Silt piled in the streets like snow. It was a treasure trove of knowledge, perfectly preserved.

As she swam through the streets, peculiar names on glass windows sent her mind racing. Cockadoos. Kooky Canuck. Schwabs. What where these places? What was their purpose?

She marveled at this, a whole city, transformed in a moment into a new Atlantis.

Memphis Note
Everyone who lives in Memphis knows that we’re decades over due for an earthquake from the New Madrid fault. And the last one that hit us created Reelfoot Lake and made the Mississippi River flow backwards to fill said lake. God only knows what the next one will do.