It was exactly twelve years to the day after she arrived that Tengu left Haven. She said the important goodbyes, claimed to have no idea where she was going next, and walked out of the wastes.

Ato, Beep, and Emen didn’t leave Haven as permanently as Tengu. As much as Ato liked Haven, she liked fighting more. Emen probably liked Haven more than he liked fighting, but he wanted to stay with his sister. Beep couldn’t have cared less about Haven, she was just following Ato.

Heft and Pest moved to Ivterran. They came back to visit from time to time, and see their friends, but they had been born in Ivterran and they wanted to see the Independent Cities succeed.

Everyone else who’s been mentioned in this story stayed in Haven, more or less. Ryoko still went to visit her parents for her birthdays, and Ora still went with her. People came and went on expeditions into the blacklands and the old, dead spaces that were still around.

Six months after Tengu left, the first electric train made the first trip from Haven to the logging camp just nearby. It cut the travel time from seven hours to one. Weir had high hopes they could do better.

It would be four more years before trains ran all through Haven, and two more before they ran to Altok and Borirnna. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t make much difference. The telegraphs had been instrumental during the wars, but there was rarely any rush to get anywhere these days.

Weir, Mu, Hobbs, Osmond, and Lekko were not the first people to invent gunpowder, read a bit of history, and decide not to mention it.

The nation called Haven continued to grow, slower than it once had done.

Two years after peace was declared between Haven and the Lord’s House, Oszrath and Narmen finally managed to take Sun’s Light. Narmen withdrew from the war.

People moving from Oszrath, Narmen, Altok, Kzara, and the Independent Cities was not new. What was a surprise was the first family to move from the Lord’s House. Word had spread, from the entourage of a priest no longer called Consideration, that Haven was actually quite a devout nation.

It was a surprise to the slow stream of refugees from the Lord’s House fleeing the war with Oszrath exactly what that seemed to mean. Some went back home, some stayed and did their best to adjust.

The odd person to move from Ovek joked that Ovek had been smart to never get involved with the House’s fight against Haven. News made it to Ovek, via an increasingly roundabout trip, of Ato’s work in the south, dismantling Wasolan.

Ovek was the only one of Haven’s neighbours that they still left alone. Ovek had long been the most powerful nation in the region, having spread over the centuries from a swath of volcanic land much further north up the mountains and the Altok river.

Maybe there were suspicions of Haven’s involvement in various slave uprisings over the years, but they weren’t worth pursuing. Rumours of Haven’s involvement in riots and protests through Oszrath, as the state bought indenture contracts it shouldn’t have been allowed to buy to bolster its army, were similarly not worth pursuing, regardless of their accuracy.

Narmen got a stern talking to when one of its citizens was arrested at one of the riots. An unidentified woman with geometric tattoos all over her body was studiously ignored.

Everyone went back to their lives. Except for all the indentured people rioting in the streets.

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Eventually Narmen offered to rejoin the war if Oszrath agreed to reforms to their system of indenture. It took another year, and a siege from the Lord’s House against Sun’s Light, for Oszrath to agree to immediately release close to a quarter of their fighting forces.

There was no second offer of peace to Oszrath. Eventually the war just petered out and no one much wanted to continue it. The Lord’s House just bought their new slaves from Ovek and invested their time in a defensive line along their new borders with Haven, Narmen, and Oszrath.

What Ato did to Wasolan was more complicated. Every time she came back to Haven for a break, she seemed to have more lovers and a great deal more tattoos. If Beep was asked about the situation she would smile dreamily and say that she was still Ato’s tattooist.

Like Ovek, Wasolan had not primarily expanded through violence. There had been threats, certainly, but there had also been agreements, alliances, and trade routes. Not every city was like the Independent Cities, full of slaves who remembered their freedom.

As in the Independent Cities, no one wanted to be a slave.

Gradually, piece by piece, Ato dismantled Wasolan. Moving slowly south through slave uprisings and mass violence until, getting dangerously close to only the four cities that had originally become Wasolan nearly three hundred years ago, Wasolan outlawed slavery.

In her wake was a loose network of largely independent cities and towns with a few things in common: an absolute outlawing of slavery; a form of popular governance inspired by Haven and the Independent Cities; a healthy fear of upsetting Ato in any way; and an open approach to sex and nudity.

Just past thirty and showing no signs of slowing down, Ato considered turning her attention to Ovek, but decided instead to continue south into the distant nations that had enabled Wasolan to survive through the war with Narmen.

In Outpost, Jules officially retired on her fiftieth birthday. This had no appreciable impact on the sorts of things she got up around Haven compared to the last four years, except that instead of just saying she didn’t want to do something, she would say that she was retired.

Beetle, Owl, and Fork were appointed her official successors, since obviously no single person could take over for Jules. The Sand Crawlers hadn’t really been any sort of independent entity for a very long time, and continued not to be. The old Sand Crawlers and Jules, who was retired, continued to train people in spear fighting, archery, and sneaking around the desert.

Weir, Osmond, Mu, Hobbs, and Lekko, along with friends and associates, continued arguing about technology and occasionally inventing something useful. The telegraph system was eventually upgraded with typewriter-like keyboards. They eventually worked out how to make sand batteries, which were very slightly more efficient than Tengu’s sinkholes, but importantly easier to make and maintain.

Beln rattled around Haven and Narmen, somewhere between a public servant and a diplomat, enjoying his life as much as he was able.

Esera and Ilbira started the first actual qualification in Haven’s school. Esera was of the opinion that anyone who wanted to be a midwife, or a midhusband as the case may be, needed to have at least a certain set of knowledge and training before they were released on the populous.

The idea of qualifications didn’t exactly take off, but no one disagreed with Esera’s analysis of the situation. It would be a while before the next medical qualification course was designed for doctors, also with Esera’s help.

Andros, Logan, and Willik kept on teaching people how to cook at Haven’s school, running their respective restaurants, and sharing a lot of gossip with Ora and the other public servants.

Ora took more breaks from being a public servant than she had before the peace treaty with the Lord’s House. Sometimes she would go on expeditions with Ryoko, sometimes she would go and visit Pest and Heft in the Independent Cities. Sometimes she would go way down south to pay a surprise visit to Ato and her polycule.

Mostly, she stayed in Haven and did her best to keep on helping people. Even if Haven was calm and balanced, that didn’t mean people didn’t need help. There was always something to be busy with.

Ora missed Tengu, of course. She missed Ato and Emen and Heft and Pest. She missed Ryoko and Jules, in the odd month or two that they didn’t see each other. She figured it was fine. That was what happened when you knew people, you missed them when they weren’t there.

At least no one had died.

I will admit, it’s a very optimistic story.