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Walking the Dust

1: The New World

Apparently, things weren't always like this.

I've been walking the country for ten years. At Wosh-Tun, I stood on the shores of the Great Sea. I wanted to go in the sea, to feel it for myself, but the boats they have are only good enough to cross the swamplands to the North-East, where the people there grow most of their hemp, and they wouldn't let me join them on a harvest. One of the wives told me it's bad luck to let a woman on board a boat, and I guess those guys need all the luck they can get. One lungful of the black swamp water will kill them.

I went to the Suntop Peaks in the West, and saw the deadlands beyond. A wise man I met there told me that on a good, clear day you can see all the way to the Endless Water, but all I could see was desert. I think he may have been mad; the black death came for him a week later. His family took him into the hills to die, when he started coughing. It's always the coughing that infects others.

I didn't meet anyone else who'd ever seen the Water.

I've been to the border of the North, the wasteland that stretches away to the North-West for ever. They're a hard people, up there. My people think they're tough in Lo-Wil, so close to the Northern Ocean. But there are others even farther North, in towns and villages where the wind blows down off the deadlands and goes right through your bones.

And I've been South, following the Suntop Peaks as far as I could. But they become impassable after a while. I heard stories that there's a whole country of people living at Peak's End, on a peninsula that juts out into the Great Sea. Some people have even tried sailing down there.

Nobody ever comes back.

I've seen just about everything there is to see in this land. But there's one thing I've never heard: an answer to the Big Wet that I believe.

Everyone I met in Wosh-Tun told me a story of "new killer war". I even heard one of their priests, an Artisian, tell it. The story goes that before the Big Wet, the planet was a corrupt place of cities and people filled with hatred and violence. Peaceful, loving people were few and far between, ignored as the world went to war again and again. So God sent his angels to Earth, to wage the New Killer War. The angels only killed people with hatred in their hearts, leaving the good and the just to rebuild a world of peace.

It's a nice story, and if you never left the South-East you'd think it was completely true, because everyone down there believes it. I guess it spread from Wosh-Tun to all the outlying towns and villages.

But it's only one story. I've heard one that's pretty much the same, but believes the opposite—that God sent his angels down to take all the good, peaceful people away up to heaven. We're the unworthy ones, abandoned by God and left to the mercy of devils.

Then there are the stories that don't involve God at all. In the North, on the edge of the never-ending wasteland, the most common story says that the planet just upped and died. That mankind abused and destroyed it, without caring what we were doing until it was too late. But too late is too late, and the planet couldn't take it any more. These are its last days, and we're dying with it.

One of the most interesting stories, though, is told by the Sunners. I'll write more about them later, because I don't think Jerod or Father have ever met one. At least, not when I struck out. They might have by now. Sunners are spreading quickly, and a lot of people are converting. The Sunner story of the Big Wet tells how Mother Sun and Father Moon got angry with mankind after we spurned their children, and their tears drowned the world.

There are dozens more stories out there. Some are only believed by one village, some are spread out across a wide area. They're all fascinating. They tell us about people, and our need to understand. But I don't believe any of them.

The one thing I do believe is that the land of A-Ree-Yass-I, wherever it is, truly exists. Because every single one of the Big Wet stories I've heard mentions it. They all say that's where it started, where the first blow was struck.

If only someone knew where it was.