1001. Exogignesthai, 1
(Rose)
I felt dizzy. My migraine was hurting me.
Tilke had listened to me with some honest fascination.
I drank. I twitched in sharp moments of pain in the left side of my brain. I sighed. It’s really not good for me...
Although over the years, it does gets a little better and better. Although it still hurts a lot, almost more than I can handle.
It sounds like I’m thinking about sex... But really it’s how my brain has ever been wired for imagining fantasies beyond a point.
It hurts and I feel dizzy.
We’ve reached a decrepit hiker’s refuge the heights of the mountain. Is this how the heroess’ homeland looks like?
Tilke didn’t say much. She’s thinking too about the logical end of things following what I told her of Nightmare’s plan.
And this next and other day, she looked at me earnestly during a moment of lunch and resting our feet.
T - What if... Things didn’t work? For her.
R - For Nightmare?
I feel like my head will break. As if I’m going to fall into something I’m not ready to handle.
But I also recognise that thirst in Tilke, as I’ve for ever been cursed the same.
I sit on the creaking bed. I pour myself more spring water. I start unlocking these sides of my brain that hurt but can draw other things.
I too... want to know a better picture of her future that might be. On the thin flowing edge between hopes and realism. How could things evolve after something plausibly goes wrong?
I close my eyes and I start to think.
My head feels the vertigo restarting. My senses go slightly numb, as if I really was myself travelling.
~
Once upon a time, in a far future on a planet incredibly far away... Ages have been skipped in this planet’s ecological history, but nothing really betrays it at first glance.
Oceans and lands are teeming with wild life. Only I as an overseeing and exterior narrator would know, how this world truly came to life.
And only I would realise in these times when only unintelligent life prospered, that the plan of Anima Mundi had somehow derailed.
Perhaps a meteor struck on the unlikely weak point of hers. An extinction event occurred either way, in this prehistoric era when no mind would be able to record it.
The ecosystem changed, and in the matter of millions of years, life simply flows and continuously transforms around everything.
Only the narrator would know that something was off track from her previous will, and that Soul would never awoke as intended.
Animal Life would disseminate and change. The most intelligent species would begin to bud tooling and external memories.
Population would grow, yet Soul’s echoes would never travel to global signal levels. As if she was dead.
This world’s history about to start would not be hers, but theirs.
One or a few dominating and competitive species would rise.
The fauna from the wilderness was evolving in kind.
In millennia of growing arm’s race, from prehistoric times and on, some species would start fiercely competing and rapidly adapting.
Some predatory beasts and humanity of a new kind would really start to transform against one another. The monsters by their natural selection and predatory selection of the bigger and fiercer individuals, with stronger reproductive instincts and bolder aggressiveness.
Humanity with sharper strategies, digging holes, cutting trees, sharpening blades and poles into spears; wearing primitive cloth and leather to protect their skin from claws.
I wonder what they could really descend from and look like. But it would kill me to imagine that I fear, so I would really envision them as sabretooth predators and wolves against cave men.
Maybe they all look like squids they evolved from and competed for the limited shorelines at first instead of forests.
Oh. My head hurts...
~
The competition of species would grow in fierce strife and war. Each side would open its options from intuitions. The monsters with varying strategies and much heavier biology, with fast metabolisms.
Humanity with growing usage of their intelligence.
Walls. Weapons. Domestication of other useful species even. For food and even smaller monsters, for support in the hunts.
Whatever would be the equivalents of wolves turning to dogs and goats providing milk.
Over the centuries, the primitive villages would take the upper hand over the wilds.
Seeds of civilisations would start there, between families making villages. History would start with the invention of a series of drawn symbols defining some objects and their numbers.
The generations of people with increasingly refined toolings and languages would really start to build more than survival.
The monsters would be hunted down deeper into the woods and their original grounds, over the following centuries. No matter how draconic in might they would end up being, they would be less and less of a match.
Between cooperation, strife, greed and altruism, societies and civilisations were budding, looking for their bigger role of survival as more than the individuals with resemblance.
Looking for more food to grow in number, better lands to live upon, and more intelligence to organise things, improve tools and improve buildings. Even more to grow strategies for everything.
This growing social standing of mathematicians would become prised brains for organising optimally the time of sowing and harvests, and times for rationing. They also help build better things in all kinds of ways.
The education of children takes a turn in efficiency when they no longer follow their parents from birth to independence, but rather experts in their fields to learn more. Tutors or teachers begin to appear.
The differentiation of social bodies and jobs really starts and grow fast.
Mainly you have the soldiers to hunt, fight and defend. You then have the producers behind for food production and transformation, but also craftsmanship and building.
And finally you have the mathematicians to help optimise the organisation of everything, building logistic lines and tactics for all.
Of course it’s not solid frontiers like contract jobs from Earth’s modern age. Everyone knows a little of each as they need, but specialisations spread into expertise and careers already. Education follows, and then recordings in externalised memories.
The mathematicians and experts help finding good ores, rich veins and ways to use them. Metallurgy really makes the end of the wilder age when fighting monsters could mean the end of everything. With sturdier armours and weapons, it would become regular culling at worse, like field’s harvesting.
As these little chiefdoms grew in power and mind; they explored the world.
They conquered it.
Wars between ambitious warlords began.
Collective repositories of knowledge were built by these early kingdoms able to gather the most resources to allow so.
Like cellular organisms, they grew, they tried to find balance between inner and exterior pressures. It’s always moving.
History was being written for and by them.
And as they dug the world for resources with endless hunger, sometimes they stumbled upon odd things.
Fossils mainly, albeit nowhere near as fascinating as what Earth had to offer.
But rather occasionally, they found some shards of a sturdier and unusual ceramic.
Always the same size, of a wing of a butterfly. Never in veins.
And once upon a time, they would even unearth mysterious minerals, with tetrahedral sculptures that had been buried and fossilised over eons.
Their cause and reason would bug them, the thinkers of this new history.
But the meaning of these artefacts would be lost to them and times.
~
