Aelia

It's not quire tomorrow yet!
I.... yeah, I honestly forgot I needed to do this.
Anyway, tomorrow is the one week mark for the Atlas of Impossible Worlds. Which is hardly much of an achievement, but *I* feel proud. I don't know if it'll be any good, but it should at least be a little different.
Anyway:
There is a nameless city, high in the mountains, where it always rains. It has walls that seem to be made of a single piece of black rock, and streets that had never seen sunlight. No living thing in its right mind would be willing to go near the place. So it would take an incredible cynic not to be surprised that it was one of the busiest cities in the world.
As it happened, the city was located on the only pass through the Dark Mountains, which stretched from one side of the continent to the other. Those who wanted to get from one side to the other, could pass through, or they could die trying to cross any other way.
As one might guess, there was more behind the city than awful weather and an architect with a very particular sense of style. In fact, the reason in question was currently lying in a mausoleum under the city. His name was Aleos.
He was born more than a thousand years ago, the third of six sons, to one of the petty kings who had dotted the area centuries ago. He had been an ambitious youth, and a brilliant one. But he was cold, and prone to keep his own counsel.
And then, one day, another king’s soldiers had, mysteriously, been able to break into his family’s home. The entire family was killed - Aleos was the only survivor.
He had been furious - uncharacteristically furious. There was no indication of which of the neighboring kings might have been responsible, so he had waged war on every single one of them. And conquered them. That wasn’t unusual - the petty kings conquered one another all the time. But the speed and brutality of it, that had been new. In a scant few weeks, the neighboring kingdoms had been brought to heel.
But King Aleos didn’t stop. By charm or by force or by magic, he continued to grow his kingdom, until he became known as high king, and then as emperor. And still, he continued to spread out across the continent like a dark blot, until only  the furthest corners were free from his rule. And then, not even those. He sent out ships, to find new lands, and bring them under his rule. And by means of dark magics, he conquered even the inevitable march of age.
But even that didn’t last forever - it ended the way it is traditional for such things to end, with an unlikely band of heroes, who came together, stormed his fortress, and, after an epic battle, slew him.
Naturally, within the year, the entire continent was engulfed in civil war the likes of which the world had never seen. Emperor Aleos had built an empire, but hadn’t been particularly concerned with whether or not it would outlive him. Warlords and kings rose and fell within days or weeks. The dead plied up in the roads and in the fields, plague and famine stalked the land.
In time, the fighting died down - if only because there simply weren’t enough people left alive to keep it up. But the broad stability of the former continent was lost forever. What rules there had been to war, no longer held - Emperor Alexos had not been beholden to any rules. And, in time, Aleos’ fortress fell into ruin. Whatever name it had once been called by, was lost. And Alexos was remembered only as a legend, as the man who had forged order out of chaos. Noone knew what had happened to those who had killed him.
Until one day two armies met amongst the ruins of that ancient fortress, and the hungry earth drank deep of blood. And, as it turned out, Aleos had not been quite dead. For as the armies fought, the sky turned dark, and the nameless city rose from the ground about them. Thunder and lightning split the air, the earth rippled like water, and the dark mountains rose from the ground like great waves, splitting the entire continent in two, then spreading outward into the sea. Not a single one of the soldiers there that day left the city alive.
But they left. Clad in the ancient uniform of Emperor Aleos’s armies, their eyes were hollow, their flesh rotting. They brought peace, and they brought law - those who broke the laws of the ancient empire, were punished according to those laws. Which was a problem, because there was no record of what those laws had been. But over time, people learned. Enough to get by, anyway. They survived, they kept their heads down, and if they had any complaints about their new situation, they learned to speak about them only in whispers, and only behind locked doors.