***I had wanted to write a special piece for my 100th posting. It began simply enough, as most of my poor offerings do, with an idea and me sitting down to begin. Well, I liked it so much that I just kept going, and it's turned into something far more than I'd ever envisioned. So here I am, and instead of my 100th posting being the tale that I had in mind, it's going to have to be the prologue for it.
Just a word to readers though; by all means invest in the characters, but this spans a tortured globe and there are many, so if the focus leaves some that you like for a while, most of them make other appearances before the end. Be advised though that life here is still a contact sport, and not everyone makes it to the end alive. Looking back, I'm a little surprised at the range of character types that have found their way into this, so if you're not a fan of one sort, keep going, I've probably got something that you like in one of my characters, lol.
I have tied a few places and historical events into this, but only as signposts in a work of fiction and fantasy. This tale is set on Earth some four hundred years from now, but technology has crumbled away for the most part, though it still exists after a fashion here and there and I've tried not to paint you a bleak post-apocalyptic world. Instead, I offer a view at a world that is recovering and has become a green place once more where some surprising creatures thrive. The technology changes from one group to the next, but we're mostly back to hack and slash - or swashbuckling, if you like that better.
If you like to think in terms of couples, then this might be looked at as several tales, but it works toward the final end always. Where I've left a couple for a time to move the others ahead, I've tried as much as I could to do it so that I could read it myself and apply a 'The End' right at that point for that pair or group, so that it didn't feel to me to be hanging. 0_o
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Prologue
The telling of it wasn't like one of those tales which begin along the lines of "Once upon a time." That's how fairy tales begin, and fairy tales usually have at least something of a happy ending for someone.
This began more like a war story, and a lot of those start something like, "So there I was..."
Either way, things changed markedly for mankind and their fellow travelers on the spinning ball known as Earth after a set of events some four hundred years ago now. Astronomers had long predicted the arrival of a comet and that if there wasn't an actual collision between, then it would be a very near thing indeed.
As it happened, it was the very near thing.
Everything on Earth - every plant and tree, every living organism and inanimate object, travels at over thirteen thousand miles per hour as the planet hurtles along through its orbit. Since it's been going on for longer than any of us have been alive and it never changes, we don't notice it, having no nearby points of reference anyway. We're all conceived as the result of a hopefully happy act of sex somewhere, we live our lives and then we pass on -- all while traveling at that same constant velocity the whole time.
On that fateful day as the comet passed by the Earth, there was enough of an impact in terms of the gravitational pull of a large object hurtling by only a few thousand miles away that it was felt on Earth as a shift which resulted in the loss of over a billion and a half of its human inhabitant's lives. It was something like living on a table where someone had suddenly moved the tablecloth back and forth once. It wasn't like an earthquake and given the mass of the planet, it wasn't even a very large shift, though some of the effects were the same; it just moved several inches in one direction and then back again to roughly the same spot a few seconds later.
But compared to that slight and small shift, the most violent earthquake would be thought of as gentle.
With the shift, the tectonic plates on which we all live moved a little and from that, the real earthquakes began seconds afterward and the aftershocks went on for weeks. The majority of the world's buildings didn't survive it. One sixth of its human population didn't survive the first week either. Tsunamis occurred all over the world anywhere from minutes to hours afterward. The loss was incalculable.
And that was only the beginning.
The state of the world's weather systems changed somewhat, though they did return more or less to normal within a few years. But societies were upset by the effect, the social order evaporated in many places as billions of people everywhere sought to go on living in a world where, for example, the economies faltered and failed, diseases such as cholera ran rampant and unchecked in places where they had been considered eradicated for so long. Wars began over dwindling food and petroleum stocks. Billions more starved.
And the global pandemic so long predicted chose that time to come to pass as well.
But that hadn't been the only thing changed. It was as though the shift had caused something else to change. Man came into contact with creatures which were, up to that point thought to be the products of the imaginations of writers and storytellers. There really were elves, it seemed, all manner of them. It caused a few issues, since to them, we were the ones who had made a sudden appearance and not the other way around.
Though most of the breeds considered mankind to be a collection of benign dolts who were to be humored if one was feeling charitable, there was one type which gave humans a reason to avoid them at all costs, showing humans all that they needed to know about why the Drow ought to be left alone.
It happened seldom that dark elves ventured forth on the surface of the world at night, but the mere sight of one usually meant that one's death was not far off, because if one of them had allowed themselves to be seen, it almost always indicated that their being seen was unavoidable and quick murder was the remedy for that.
Other creatures appeared with the elves, and though it was a stretch, we all called those ones goblins.
But there was more to come.
Other races from other worlds began to appear over time. In the case of two of them, it was a rather eventless thing, since for the most part, they left humanity alone. Beset with all sorts of ever-changing problems, humankind couldn't even come up with an appropriate name for them which we could all agree on.
We just called them demons. It was a little odd, given that they weren't particularly malicious to us. It was just the word used most often because that was how the things looked to us, and so it just stuck.
There was a third race which also made its appearance, and the trouble was that it was almost impossible for humans to tell one kind from the other. Most people thought they were the same thing. But where one was slightly benevolent or just ignored us, the other was murderous to humans wherever they appeared, howling and raging as though completely mad, most of them.
All of this changed many things.
What had once been a commerce-driven world reverted rather quickly backward, skipping the industrial phase altogether and becoming an agrarian one again. Very few people manufactured things now, since there was no way to distribute the products, and there was no longer any form of universally accepted currency, other than base metals, gold, silver and copper. The horse experienced a re-emergence as the most valuable asset that many people could have. Man was back to being a tiller of the land to keep himself and his family alive, since the next step was to go back to being a hunter-gatherer once more.
