The world ended.
It happened very nearly as they’d been warned. One slip, one faltering instant, one crack in a lance, one death on the skyline, one moment of weakness and the whole thing fell apart.
In came the auroras, the other skies. They seized the breach and the knights and their icy lances and the walls and the towers and all of it and they threw it away, into the sky, so far away that it couldn’t be seen.
And then they came south, and began in earnest.
Up went the keeps.
Up went the ice-farms.
Up went the occasional unlucky bastard who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and didn’t see the sky change.
Up went trees, stones, surprised deer, anything but not everything, just some things, yanked into the air and carried up and away to who knew what for god knows what reason.
The cities fell apart in chaos. The high command was torn apart. The sky ran bright with alien colours.
The world had ended.
So what was everyone supposed to call where they were living?
The sun came up.
The sun went down.
The sun came up.
The sun went down.
The sun came up and went down and the auroras muddied the sky and the world still had ended and it still wasn’t gone.
People began to come back.
They crept back into the cities, slunk out from cellars, emerged from the woods and all of them realized they still weren’t alone. There were other people out there.
Some of them reacted very poorly to this.
Maniacs and madmen aside, there were voids that needed filling. Safe places (what was safe, with the sky now alien?), food, water, and direction to all of those things. Leadership was sought.
Some of them reacted far too eagerly to this.
Little tyrants rose and little tyrants fell. It was very hard to oppress anyone when your iron grasp began and ended at arm’s-length, plus two of your friends. Harder still when there was nothing to tie anyone to anywhere beyond their feet. And hardest of all when even the mightiest would-be-ruler still scurried inside for fear of the night sky… and may just find that someone had removed the roof of their dwelling.
The auroras took fewer these days, but memories were very vivid things.
The sun came up.
The sun went down.
It wasn’t going anywhere. Neither were the auroras.
Some things started growing.
Not the icicles – the auroras might be less fierce in the skies, but they still came down like lightning on any attempts to make new lances.
Not the old crops.
Strange things. Fruits that sprouted from roots; tubers that dangled from the tops of the trees. They smelled red and tasted loud but they nourished and that was more than enough to make them desirable.
Farming was being relearned, slowly but surely. Crops needed water, and sun, and the midnight suns that glowed in the air and dragged them skywards, inch by inch. And they were ripe when they began to sing.
Some of the old guard, the ones that had been powerful once, they said nothing good would come of it. They ate the old crops, the wheat, the barley, the maize.
The sun came up.
The sun went down.
At night, songs came. It was hard to tell if this was new or something that nobody had listened to before.
They used colours instead of melodies, and they spooled themselves away before dawn could spoil them. No harmonies were used.
Covering the ears did nothing; beeswax did nothing; singing loudly to yourself annoyed your friends but otherwise did nothing.
Covering your eyes worked, though only the most stubborn insisted upon it. Former knights, mostly, who insisted that they’d never heard this sort of thing before, back on the skyline. The auroras had been quiet then, desperate and fierce and quiet, even in the deep heart of the long night.
Some of the younger ones said they could still hear them at midday, faintly. Somewhere up above, where the sky was always dark.
The sun came up.
The sun went down.
The world moved on regardless.
Things came from above. Some of them were unrecognizable and some of them were just barely familiar and some of them hadn’t changed at all and it was hard to say which of the three was the most unsettling.
Cats were the same. Except for the floating.
Deer didn’t have legs, or eyes, and they had stone teeth. They fed on pebbles now.
It was entirely possible that the Longarm had been some kind of spruce before, but nobody wanted to get close enough to confirm it. Any distance from a Longarm had a nasty way of becoming close.
It was their arms. They were very long; to say nothing of their needles.
The sun came up.
The sun went down.
That was just the way the world worked.
The world worked.
Oh, sometimes it creaked here and there. Someone was lifted too high and never came back down; a field grew too tall to be harvested; a mad old relic tried to grow icicles in her basement and her whole house vanished overnight.
Sometimes an aurora died and the corpse landed on someone. Those things could happen. Those things did happen.
But that was just the way the world worked. It was normal.
It was normal to listen with your eyes at midday.
It was normal to drift up above the trees as you slept and descend by daybreak.
It was normal to ask permission of the Longarms before you walked into the bogs.
It was normal to send any message that needed speed (if not accuracy) by cat.
It was normal, because it was natural, because that’s how things were.
And if it was a little different from the way it was before, well. That was just the old days, when things were strange and they hadn’t discovered normal yet.
Back before the world began.