Indistinguishable from Magic

We are told that what lives here started out there. And thus, here became the temporary abode, and out there became Home.

In the early days, before Ainwa was given form, we are told that the Undying walked the ground. The Undying wiped the ground clean, and moulded what became Ainwa from the rock. The Undying sculpted the mountains, filled the lakes and planted the forests. The Undying put two moons in the sky and set Ainwa revolving around the star.

The Undying moulded the first People from dust, we are told. The Undying breathed a brilliant consciousness into the first People, and gave them awareness.

The Undying presented them with three Gifts.

The first was Light. Sacred, glorious orbs that would inhale daylight and exhale it gently over the long nights. The Undying told the People to take Bottled Light wherever on Ainwa they spread, and to be thankful whenever the night came and they were grateful for the nourishing glow.

The second was Machinery. A seed of mechanical life was planted within the first People. The seed would grow around them, strengthening them, letting them know that the Undying was always with them. The People were told that the Machinery would guard their souls, and would return them Home after they took their last breath.

The third Gift, and the greatest Gift, was History. The Undying educated the People about their origins. The Undying told them about life in the early days, and the intelligences which had prospered then.

In the fathomless aeons below Ainwa's time, powerful beings had swam. Reality was clay to them. But still, reality was not enough. As time went on, and reality cooled, they retreated from reality, writing their consciousness onto the interiors of stars, and lived in bliss inside their own mentalities.

The Undying, the People were told, was one of these beings, returned to involvement in reality.

Endowed with Light, Machinery and History, the People spread throughout Ainwa, as the Undying looked on. Many did not survive, and returned Home. Those that remained consoled themselves in the knowledge that their lost kin had returned to the Undying.

More time passed.

And thus we arrive here.

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So you might have guessed, this is another fiction quickie written in half an hour. I'm actually quite invested in the idea of writing something longer, perhaps a riff on Arthur C. Clarke's dictum 'sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. I really want to write something in the far future, after the brightest stars are all gone, and the ravages of entropy are truly being felt, but in the style of a fantasy.

What you've just read might be considered the first draft of the first part of a longer piece of fiction. If I decide to pop along with this, the ideas will probably change considerably. I already have indistinct concepts relating to a non-functional nuclear weapon (owing to the half-life of uranium), abstract intelligences written as patterns in the cores of stars and ghostlike apparitions, reflecting personalities located light-years distant.

It feels good to put something on paper (well, you know what I mean), so there's some record that the ideas exist.