Islands in the Sky

1.2

This is the history of the world.

First there was magic. Then there was none. And then there was magic again.

The ancients, those wonderworkers of metal and plastic and air, they did not believe in magic. They looked at their world and saw no magic and told themselves that no magic now meant that therefore magic could never be.

They believed the history of the world had been thus. First people believed wrongly in magic. Then wisely, they did not. And that was as the world was, forever.

But they were wrong. They were wrong about everything, because they did not know that the world could change.

This is the true history of the world.

First there had been magic. And then there had been none. And then there was magic once again.

And with that magic came the awakening, and the war, which some now call the God’s War, in which those with magic tried to defeat those with none, and when both had been evenly matched. So then there was short, awful war in which unimaginable numbers of people died, as gods fought heroes, and emotionless war-machines, too. There was a war, and a burning of the land and skies, and plagues and famine and all manner of devastation.

And then there was the rising, although none knew why.

Some weapon, or some mixing of magic and the tools of the ancients, or perhaps just the hand of god for god’s own mysterious reasons, had cracked the world asunder and lifted it into the sky. Now the surface of the world floated, some miles above the glow of hot broken rock that was the actual surface. All the surface of the world had been made into islands, larger and smaller, covered in grass or trees or ocean or the ancients’ cities, although the ocean waters had run off almost right away. The islands floated, through who knew what power. They floated, weightless, all at around the same height in the sky, apparently light enough that the winds blew them into columns which floated alongside one another, and a rope tied between two trees could pull two islands together. That light, but not so light that heavy rain would make an island sink and settled.

That had been the end of the war. That had been the end of everything. Now magic was gone again, so everyone said. Magic was gone, with the effort of lifting the world into the sky. Gone, or at least used up in that deed.

Magic was gone and the old times were too. They were stories, little more. Now there were only islands, and eking out an existence, and hoping for the wealth and comfort that the windfall of an unscavenged island could bring.