Episode 4: The Fall

Recap:  My people took to the sky and tried to emulate birds as much as possible as the world was coming to an end.  As a youthful member of my clan I had the job of "gatherer", a potentially dangerous and thrilling job.  We were taught to avoid land and sea, so falling was never the plan.



The Fall

While flying and diving about I saw the billowing green of leaf for an evening meal but changed my trajectory towards the shiny gold wires I noticed in the distance floating on the waves near the forest I was gathering above.  The drafts agreed with me and we rushed together past the shore toward the glinting collection of thin wire that barely caught the morning’s light as whatever it was lilted and rolled with the tide.  As I approached I stretched down my right hand and used my left to slightly adjust the cords that held my fore sails.  As I had done a thousand times I let my hand graze the object to see if it was light enough to want to come with me.  With no resistance the golden wire had no weighty connection to the waves and easily began to soar away with me.  Then like a hatchling I foolishly gripped my hand closed and started to climb the drafts.  In one horrifying instant the catch became the captor.  The fine golden threads were only part of the item for a resistance of amazing weight ripped my hand behind me upending me and tangling the fore sails’ cord around my left thigh. Sky and sea spun in my eyes as I watched a huge solid piece of my doomed treasure show itself briefly above the waves, just long enough to pierce my main chute and strike my brow. I never saw exactly what was attached to the pretty wire.

Letting go of my foolish treasure came too late.  I grabbed cord and threw sail as I spun into the air away from my draft.  I careened into the sky, the waves becoming smaller and blurred as I briefly hoped that I had survived touching the poisoned and heavy water when I felt the last remnants of my draft leave me behind.  For one moment all of my sails and chutes hesitated then limply collapsed inward like a shriveled fruit as I began my fall.  I used every technique I knew and for one second the rushing air around me seemed to consider slowing my fall, then I smelled the water at my face before everything went black.

Coming Next: The Swimmers

Episode 3: To the Clouds

RECAP: Glass ships float in the seas to the north in our world that exists after the ending of the world.  The world is going through an "Edening", healing and becoming a garden before it becomes a heaven to the souls who went on before.  We live here now.  Different clans learned from different creatures how to survive.  The people of the glass barges looked to the water.  My story will start as I fall from the sky.  Here I tell you how I got to the sky with my people.


To The Clouds

My clansmen looked to the skies for instruction. Twittering flocks come and go, and just when you wonder if no wing will ever be seen again, a flapping cloud always appears on the horizon.  At first the small band wandered to high places beyond the notice of those bickering below.  The thin air seemed to accentuate the pointlessness of wasting what little oxygen the lungs could hold on the shouting of angry words.  My clan was not the only people looking to remove themselves from the anger in the valleys of the world.  Where others failed to escape my fathers succeeded because they stopped trying to brace themselves against the winds and updrafts that tore at clothes, buffeted the brow, and ripped staked tents out of solid rock on the barren peaks.  My ancestors were those that opened their arms and let the air lift them instead of clinging to boulders.  By the time the warring ways of the world reached the mountain our clan had already floated away.

I was floating before I fell.  Man cannot grow wings, but the updrafts and currents of the world care not if you be made of feather or fur… or skin.  Warm air will always rise and warmed air is not difficult to produce, either by flame, which can consume too quickly, or by gasses and heat produced by decaying flesh or foliage.  It is not that my people fly, or never touch ground, we simply only touch the ground lightly, perhaps with just one toe, before letting the air lead us on another rolling trip across the sky.  We feel like birds, we act like them.  We take comfort in the twittering of our loved ones to know that they are near.  We take it upon ourselves to work while others take a moment to rest.  While resting we are acutely aware that we soon need to get back on task to give the chance to another to rest.  As such we are a strange people I presume, never fully awake or asleep as a whole.  Darkness is as much of our world as sun.  We gather more than we produce, we leave behind anything heavy, philosophically or physically.  Our sky rafts are marvelous creations that have evolved over the years.   Large sales billow above and below embracing the updraft and releasing the down.  All that decays and warms the air is held on raised platforms where the smells associated with decay can flow freely away from the people.  Those same gaseous smells and warm currents fill our sails and keep us in the air.  Sitting, laying, or in anyway adding to the weight of the rafts for any length of time is considered foolish, dangerous, or selfish.  From infancy we are raised with what we call wings and sails, wide as a wing is to a bird but not constructed of heavy bone.  Our wings are corded chutes and sails that let us dance among the clouds, soaring hundreds of feet in any direction at any time.  When clouds clear we see the world below, but typically the nebulous clouds are our floor, keeping us separate and safe from forest and sea.

I am in the strong days of my youth, or was when I fell.  We had always been told that heavy soil could not soar, that wet sails could not billow, and that both were likely still poisoned still and equaled death.  Those in the strong days of youth are gatherers and tread lightly on the boundary between good advice and adventure.   We would step off of the air rafts letting ourselves plummet toward the earth below, scrutinizing the rapidly approaching world for glints of anything of value or curiosity while simultaneously feeling for the draft that would fill our sails and lead us rushing along the ground and back to the sky.  To walk upon stone was rare, and unnervingly still and dead feeling.  Instead a trinket of interest would be approached on the heady rush of the wind, grasped by an outstretched hand and carried away on the breeze by an airman and his chutes and wings.  Heavy things have no value, so there was never a temptation to grasp weighty treasures too heavy to bring into the sky… but errors can be made, and gatherers in the strong days of their youth did not always return, as is the beginning of my story.

Next Episode: The Fall

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

Episode 1: The Glass Barges of the Northern Sea

One does not just build a ship out of glass.  There are no mallets to swing or pegs to pound, no timbers to bind or planks to shape.  The grand ships of glass on the northern seas are not built, but sculpted on sand bars that emerge near the Barrier Reef briefly once every ten seasons.  The nautical clans of the glass barges converge and sculpt mounds and interwoven tunnels of sand and air entwined with hand-woven cable and wrought rods that stretch toward the sky.  Once the slashing storms rumble and flash on the horizon the barges set sail and anchor just far enough away to watch the lighting grip the rods, race along the cables, and burn the white sand in explosions of seared slashes, filling the night and darkened day with pulses of blue and colorless white. As the tides begin to seep over the scarred sand, hiding them again for another lengthy sleep below the crystal clear waves, the people in one rare eve of raucous festivity celebrate the launching of the new vessel as the waters wash away the excess sand, slowly lifting the newly now-glass mounds and conical vessel from the bar from whence it was sculpted. The young family groups assigned to people and homestead the newest barge wade through the encroaching pools and climb the netted and knotted kelp towards the stalwart newly-appointed captain who watches on with a false air of indifference fitting his status and station.

Living in a world of windows the clans of the glass barges slowly became a quiet and unedited people seeking no pretense of perceived privacy, giving themselves to a deep internal connection beyond what can be achieved through spoken word alone.  Of course my introduction to this fascinating population was not through the mariners aboard the glinting multi-hued vessels.  My introduction to the sea clans led me to very different and false conclusions about the people I had only heard about in stories told by the elders in my own clan as the young nestled and prepared to sleep. I met them in the water, the last place I would ever expect to be, a reality that was always purported to be a death sentence.  I did not meet the mariners, I met the swimmers, and then, only after I fell from the sky.

Next Episode: The Edening