Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #162 - Imperial Remnants

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Imperial Remnants

Empires are big, powerful things. When an empire falls, it doesn't just evaporate into nothingness. Bits get left behind. It might include architecture, like the Roman Colosseum, aqueducts and Hadrian's Wall. Or maybe the administrative systems survive; the modern Iranian civil governance system can trace it's evolution and principles right back to Achaemenid Persia. Perhaps it is the military legacy which remains; a legion is still used as a term for a permanently embodies combined arms formation, for example the French and Spanish Foreign Legions. The scientific knowledge of the Chinese has endured through several cycles of empire creation, collapse and re-formation. In Star Wars, the Empire fell, and various factions including the New Order tried to re-create it.

Tell me a story about the remnants of an empire in your setting ! What was the empire like and how did it fall ? What survives, and what has been forgotten ? Do people make up stories about the ruins they see around them, or take the stones and use them to build their own cities and fortifications ? Which parts of the culture have survived ? Are survivors and successors grubbing around in a dark age surrounded by a legacy they can't explain, or did the empire fall to be replaced by something better ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.
• AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
• Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.

People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah

If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂