The City Under the City
Fantasy keeps putting a beautiful dead civilization directly underneath the living one. It is not just atmosphere. It is an argument about who built the place you live in.
The shape
You know it when you see it. The castle stands on a hill. Under the castle are the foundations of an older castle. Under that is something else, older still, finer than anything the current occupants could build, made by people who are gone.
The current residents either do not know, do not care, or have decided not to think about it.
The clearest example on this shelf
The Dragonbone Chair establishes it on page 18, in a conversation, and never lets go. Doctor Morgenes to a kitchen boy:
He pushes it further back than human history: there may have been a castle here “when the Sithi first came… when Osten Ard was as new and unsullied as a snow-melt brook.” The Sithi are the elder race. They were here. They are not here now, and they did not leave voluntarily.
Simon’s reaction is the correct one and the book stages it deliberately: “The old castle seemed suddenly oppressive, its rock walls a cage. He shuddered and looked quickly around, as though some ancient, jealous thing might even at this moment be reaching out for him with dusty hands.”
He has lived there his whole life. One sentence turns his home into a lid.
What the trope is doing
1. It makes the setting older than the plot
Most fantasy worlds begin when the book does. A buried city implies thousands of years of events nobody in the story witnessed, which makes the current crisis feel like an episode rather than the point of history.
2. It is a conquest, described politely
Somebody lived there. They do not any more. The book usually does not dwell on how that happened, and the not-dwelling is the point. The current inhabitants have inherited a comfortable amnesia.
Williams makes this explicit through the appendix rather than the plot. The Hayholt’s previous masters are listed with their epithets: Fingil the Bloody King, first Rimmersman master of the place; his son Hjeldin the Mad King; Hjeldin’s lieutenant Ikferdig the Burned King; and Tethtain the Holly King, the only Hernystiri ever to hold it.
Bloody. Mad. Burned. Holly. Three warnings and one consolation. Every single person who has taken this castle has come to a bad end, and the reader is handed that as a list.
3. It gives the villain a legitimate grievance
This is the part that makes the device more than decoration. If the elder race was displaced, then the returning dark lord is not motiveless evil. He is a claimant.
Ineluki, the Storm King, is “a dead Sithi prince.” The Sithi held the hill. Men took it. He is coming back to a place that was his, and the book is entirely aware of what that implies.
4. It literalizes the past
History in most novels is exposition. Here it is load-bearing masonry. The characters walk on it. They can go down into it. What is buried can be dug up, and generally is, and generally should not have been.
The variants
| Version | What it emphasizes |
|---|---|
| The buried elder city | Conquest and inheritance. Somebody finer was here and was removed. |
| The ruin nobody can reproduce | Decline. The present is a diminished version of the past rather than an improvement on it. |
| The sealed thing | The city is a lid. Something is under it on purpose and the seal is weakening. |
| The strata | Layer on layer on layer. Nobody is the first and nobody will be the last. This is the Hayholt: predecessors, plural. |
| The living underneath | They did not all leave. Some of them are still down there and they remember. |
Why it is so much more effective than a history lesson
Because it is spatial rather than chronological.
A prologue about a fallen empire is information. A staircase going down into stonework nobody recognizes is a place the protagonist can walk into, and a thing the protagonist can be frightened of while standing still.
It also solves a real problem: how do you make a reader feel the weight of invented history without making them study it? You do not explain the past. You put it under the floor and let a character look at the floor differently.
The test for whether it is being used properly
1. Do the current inhabitants benefit from not knowing? If the amnesia is convenient, the trope is doing moral work. If it is just lost information, it is set dressing.
2. Does the buried thing act? A ruin that stays a ruin is scenery. A ruin that sends something up is a setting.
3. Is the older culture better, or just older? The strongest versions make the buried city genuinely finer, which indicts the people on top. The weakest make it merely ancient, which flatters them.
4. Can you go down? If the geography exists only in dialogue, it is a rumor. If there are stairs, it is a place.
The Hayholt passes all four, which is why one conversation on page 18 can carry four books.
Where you will meet it on this shelf
The Dragonbone Chair is the reference example and the reason this page exists. Watch for it whenever a fantasy novel describes a castle as being on a site rather than at one, and whenever a building has a wing nobody uses.
It also has a quiet cousin in a lot of Asian fantasy and web novels: the sect or city built on a battlefield, the cultivation ground that is somebody’s tomb, the ruin everyone farms next to and nobody enters. Same idea, different furniture.
Written for CVM Sekai. Novel World 101. · The Dragonbone Chair · Memory, Sorrow and Thorn · All Novel World 101