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I am writing this now because I suspect the world as we knew it is dead. To any traveler in the future who finds these words, do not be sad for us. ‘Worlds’ end and begin anew, I suspect, with far greater frequency than we realize. We have all seen ruins, but how many of us stop and think about the ruins that the people who built them saw? Life will begin again, some time in the future when I am dust. It’s probably beginning now, come to think.
So, of what happened to my world.
At first, most of the world had belonged to humans, or at least many of us felt it to belong to us. It had been so for as long as my people recorded history, until it wasn’t.
They were few, at first, and considered strange. Mutants, perhaps, caused by the dying of the world, or maybe hidden powers that had existed all along. Here great snakes that grew wings, there lizards like the dragons out of myth, elsewhere gargoyles and great beasts that were just a bit more than merely animal. Especially since those that died, or were killed, often left behind objects that no one had seen before, even though they looked a bit like crystals.
The desert began to grow, and some of them began to speak in voices that were not human, quite, but certainly could be understood. Fear and confusion in many places led to open warfare, and city states were destroyed and reformed until the world had changed beyond all recognition. New peoples emerged as the changes spread, humans with wings who were certainly not the angels of some ancient religions, but could fly nonetheless. What might have been called cats or dogs once now spoke and clothed themselves as humans would. And still, life continued.
Previous generations would doubtless have thought the world had gone mad, but life is infinitely adaptable. The danger nothing seemed able to overcome was from the weapons we’d made, and the poison that seemed to be both spreading from and a part of the new desert. Where normal deserts had their own forms of life, the desert that people had begun to call Death held nothing.
Countries across the entire world knew of it, and began to fear that it was going to cover the world.
In the great city and research facility of Caer Xhan, many of the scientists were listening. One of the earliest civilizations to accept the changes consuming the world, they had long been a beacon for the nations around them. The plan they devised was considered a bit extreme, but a great deal of effort was poured into it before it was discovered to have come from the ‘goddess’ Myria.
One of the oldest of the strange creatures, she was a being none of us understood, with powers that once would have inspired a religion. The scientists she had permitted to study her were unable to determine the source of her strength, but the technologies they developed based on what they did learn were considered nothing short of miraculous. Healing outpaced all disease and life spans increased accordingly. Crops were grown with a speed no one had seen. Nearly instantaneous transfer of matter allowed for a new kind of travel, spreading the news of Caer Xhan’s plan across the world and drawing in more and more talent even as the ideas coming from them seemed more disturbing.
Chief among them being the idea to use the remains of the new lives, which Myria called chrysm, as a power source. In a world not threatened with its own death, that alone might have brought an end to things. It certainly raised objections from various powers that people had begun to consider of a kind with Myria - Ladon in the far west and Deis in the east chief among those voices. But there was the desert, ever growing in spite of all attempts to stop it, and reservations over the morality of this power source simply were not urgent enough to change our course.
The balance of opinions tipped only when what began as a plan to cage the desert shifted into a plan to cage life, locking it away in a fragile terrarium and leaving the desert unchallenged.
We who sought to destroy Caer Xhan in the end felt that it had become a cult more than a religion, that Myria and her kind had not been unable to stop the desert, but unwilling. We believed if we could oust her from Caer Xhan before the great ocean was created we might still find a way to save the rest of the world.
By then it was of course too late. The being Myria had proven disturbingly adept at understanding technology, and had a degree of control over the systems and functioning of the facility that no one had expected. In the end, however, it wasn’t the people fighting her that stopped her power spreading, but the desert rolling into the city while they fought. The last to make it out alive had sworn she saw Myria crying as alarms went off across the city.
It does make me wonder if we were wrong in our understanding of her motivations, though it hardly matters now. She is lost somewhere in the ruins of the city, and the ocean has opened between us and that continent she chose for her ‘cradle of life’. I have to hope we can start some kind of civilization out here, that will at least survive the desert and someday adapt to it.
But I leave this here for any traveler that finds these ruins someday, in the hopes they will be able to read it, and understand what Caer Xhan was.
* * *
Momo took a deep breath as she closed the dusty book. It took a moment before she looked up at the others, to see various shades of what she was feeling. Or at least she thought so. She’d never been the best with emotions. “I found it digging through one of those half-buried houses, seeing if I could find anything useful.”
Ryu and Rei exchanged glances, and somehow Momo felt a little better when Rei said “I’m glad you found it after Garr was gone. Can’t imagine him taking it very well.”
“It sounds like Myria really cared, though. About life surviving, I mean. She just didn’t...” Nina trailed off for a moment and then continued with a grimace, “She sounds a little like my mother, trying to have everything under her control.”
Rei snorted at that. “Yeah, exactly. There’s a difference between surviving and living, right? That’s what the whole fight was about. For a long, long time I guess.”