Episode 2: The Edening

Before one can fall, a relative height must first be achieved, and to explain why I was at any height at all it is necessary to explain the end of the world.  We don’t know all things.  It is not in our way to seek out knowledge that serves no present purpose.  We know that ancient religious texts predicted the end of the world to be cataclysmic and fiery; that there would be horrors and terrors dolled out upon the evil.  Yet, the end of the world was more of a wandering away.  At least it was for the ancestors of the clans.  It became clear to a wide array of random people that the religious texts may soon be proven correct.  Some of those people proclaimed it and shouted at the wind, and others walked away.  This was not a movement or an organized sojourn; all things organized became victims of the worse prophecies.  All organizations turned on one another before and after the concept of government was blurred and then ignored.  All things of advanced technological marvelousness eventually proved inadequate to stem the flow of human nature that ripped out it’s own throat.  Those that stayed, either in person or in spirit, are no longer part of our world.  For any who stayed, prophecies of destruction were true.  One has to wonder if the prophecy foresaw the future, or caused it.  We know now that it was not necessary to become a part of the proposed ending of humanity.  Maybe that was the goal, to find the peoples who were able to look past humanity, to look beyond what it had become and to see the little things that unassumingly survived at their own pace outside the notice of tall structures or fueled mechanizations.   Above shouting matches birds floated on currents that had flowed for millennia, waves lapped at the shores of both friend and foe, soil housed entire populations of crawling things who had no inclination to even notice the fires and explosions happening on the surface of the confused globe above them.  To those the wanderers aimed.  Allegiances were not declared.  An allegiance demanded attention and a turning back.  To turn back was the death of any wanderer.  No people or group could calm those who would use force to state their allegiance.  And all who used force, those who stayed, for them, the world did end. 

A messiah came, a son of a god to minister to those who were left.  He is gone now.  The survivors were told that the world would become a haven or heaven for all righteous souls who had gone on before.  He taught that the very scarred and torn world which just barely clung to life about their feet, would become a beautiful place again, a garden worthy to be called Eden.  Gardens do not grow over one night’s fall.  Not even many nights produce flowers where nothing remained but grey soot or worse yet an absence of all things, even debris or air.  So the clans continued their wanderings, looking to the lapping waves, floating birds and digging crawly things to learn how to wait through the Edening of the world.  Survival had come to those who chose not to align with any other than their own kin.  Those who found no point in governing or ruling, besting or proclaiming, neither teaching nor adhering, as it was, now peopled the world.  And so the Edening continues.  The clans know of each other at most.  We do not know how glorious of a garden to expect before the righteous souls of those who went on before return to smell of the fruit and admire the flowers.  My grandfathers did not meet them, and I suspect there will still be places on this earth absent of beauty by the time my grandchildren are no longer roaming here.

Next Episode: To the Clouds