Automobile
"A road remembers every wheel that broke upon it."
Once a bright beacon of progress, the echo of engines rumbling and the hiss of hot oil were heard all across the planet. Automobiles, “horseless carriages” to the pious and the poor, stitched cities to frontiers, courtyards to coastlines, lovers to graves. As The Lost Ages crept towards it's violent conclusion, everyone who was anyone owned one, varnished bodies, gleaming metal engines with lantern eyes, and horns that bleated like brass geese. They ate distance and spat dust. Windshields, spoked wheels, leaf springs, magnets, miracles made mundane by repetition. Then the roads died. Bridges fell or were sectioned for barricades. Pavement heaved, split, and vanished beneath creeping root and slag. Fuel refineries went first to fire, then to salvage, then to myth. The Great Schism made every mile a battlefield and every stalled motor a tomb. What remains today are not cars but relics, hulking troop-carriers, armored couriers, and off-road brutes with clearance like stalking beasts. They are strangers in the new century, catastrophic when they fail and sacramental when they start. To hear one cough to life is to hear The Lost Ages trying, stubbornly, to breathe again.
Utility
In their prime, automobiles democratized motion. Couriers outran rumor, grain reached markets before the rot, surgeons reached patients before the fever could take them and officers reached fronts before the front reached them. Other uses included:
- Military carriage: Moving squads across shell-rutted flats, towing light guns, or serving as mobile command boxes.
- Courier & Dispatch: Vaulting broken country faster than hoof or foot when roads still hold.
- Evacuation: One last convoy dragging families out from floodlines, wildfires, or plague cordons.
- Salvage & Survey: Expeditions into ruin belts to haul back engines, bones, or worse.
Manufacturing
No new automobiles are built. The factories that birthed them lie roofless and haunted; Their assembly jigs feed cookfires, their blueprints surviving only as wall charms in roadside shrines. Attempts to restart production in Stargaze, Wardsea, or the outer foundries of Opulence have failed, shortages of refined oils, gasket-grade rubber, tempered crankshafts, ignition coils, and the thousand petty parts that make a carriage more than a coffin. What “manufacturing” remains is vivisection, three dead chassis to keep one limping. Leaf springs are hammered straight and wrapped in prayer-wire. Radiators are patched with tin and oath-solder. Carburetors are taught new lies by alchemists who swear a tincture of bone-oil will stand in for proper fuel (it won’t, not for long).
Social Impact
To common folk, an automobile is a rumor with wheels. Children draw them like Dragons. Elders tell of nights when roads glittered and engines purred like friendly thunder. To warbands and barons, a single running truck is a moving fortress, a symbol that their reach exceeds the next valley. Temples call them blasphemies that usurped the pilgrim’s foot, guilds call them leverage, thieves call them targets.
Access & Availability
Fewer than a hundred operable automobiles are believed to exist across Everwealth, and “operable” is a generous word. Most belong to crown caravans, merchant syndicates, or fortress-cities. A handful serve road-warlords and ruin-divers. Private ownership by commoners is a fireside joke. Access is rationed like winter grain:
- By writ: Monarchic convoys and guild emergencies.
- By coin: Ruin runs priced in blood and barrels.
- By theft: Brief, loud, and usually fatal.
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