Of that which came before us

Of that which came before us

Before living memory, something ended.

Of this much we are certain: the deepest ruins were raised by no kingdom currently standing, nor by any kingdom whose fall is recorded. They predate record-keeping. They are not ours.

What ended, and how, has consumed scholarship for as long as scholarship has existed. The accounts will not agree.

The sea-cultures speak of a Drowning. Their litanies name towns no chart now bears, and their priests, on the proper feast-day, will weep at the recitation if the audience is right.

The inland cultures hold to a Long Night, with no sun for years and crops failing in series. Those who survived did so, the stories tell, by descending into the cellars and the cisterns and the deep mines, and came up afterwards into a sky that did not look quite the same.

The mountain-folk speak of a Falling. They hold their own ranges were raised by it, and their masons examine old cracks with a reverence the lowlanders find difficult to share.

Among the theologians, of every register, the answer is the Sleep of a God. We live now, they say, in the dream of something we cannot name; the world’s quietness is its breathing. They are no more or less right than the others, in our reading — though their position has the advantage of being unfalsifiable, and they have built considerable institutions on it.

We have collected these accounts. We cannot reconcile them. They cannot all be right. None of them is entirely wrong.

[A correspondent of the southern academies has added in the margin, in a hand more recent than the body of the page: “I have walked the ruined stones of three coasts and one mountain pass. The stones do not agree about what year it was. I no longer think it was one event.” — H.]