I am the traveller and I travel this world under many names and for many purposes. I have seen everything that this poor benighted planet can show. I have talked with the elves of new Avalon and listened to the stories they tell. I have watched the dances they dance and ate their food. They live in our world now and their food is our food and has no power to hold us beyond that of the tastes that the elven race has had millions of years to perfect. I found that they are as gracious hosts as ever they were in the centuries before the wash changed everything.

I found they had realized that they could live amongst the humans they once despised but now, in some cases, respect without having to make any compromises or revealing that they had been hidden alongside each other for millennia. I have walked the snowy wastes of their city and marveled at the glorious heights of their architecture that recalls the cities of the old times before the human race gained a foothold upon the plains and rivers of earth. We talked of many things, the elves and I, and told each other many secrets of the world that was and the world that is. But in the end they had no real explanation for the world that is than anyone else I had met on my endless travels. But I found no answers and so I eventually left my friends to travel on and see what this new world had to offer and what I could see.

I travel across the mountains of this new world and talk to the yeti that live and breathe and sleep and dream amongst the hidden places. Where only the occasional glimpse of their reality can be seen and even then only when you are really lucky and only when they want you to see them. For they need to be seen every so often to confirm in the mind of the world their own existence for that which the world forgets sometimes vanishes as if it had never been. They tell me of their lives and how they survive hidden where there is little of what the humans call food, but much of what is never recognized as the nectar of the gods. For the gods are real and their food is real too.

They said they had seen signs and portents before the wash that had allowed them to survive untouched. But of how they had achieved this and what they had seen they couldn’t say or at least couldn’t say in any language other than there own, which no-one other than them has ever learned or understood. And so they use one of the languages of the old times before the fall of Babel to tell their stories to travelers like me who visit them. Many travelers have never heard this tongue and take it for the whispering of beasts and so never learn from this oldest of races that walk amongst us. But they could not tell me what I sought and so I traveled on.

I travel the seas and hunt the pirates that hunt the merchants and voyagers that travel the oceans of this oh so changed world. I watch the sea serpents play and listen to the mating calls of kraken as they rise unchallenged from the deeps they dwelt in while the race of man conquered the water that encompassed the surface. Men thought themselves mighty never knowing that the mightiest among them was as nothing to the least among the creatures of the depths that hunted the whales for snacks and knew the oceans of the world as their gardens. I watch the terror in a pirate’s eye as he realizes that he is not the toughest or strongest or most terrifying thing that lives in the oceans that he claims as his own. I fight amongst the heroes who are no more than people struggling to protect their families from those amongst their own species who have no need of family or friends but feel that those who do are weak and need to be killed or raped or pillaged for the good of the species. Like all those who have felt those things across the long centuries they are wrong. Their kind will die out soon as their kind always does. I listen to the joy in a child’s voice as they see the mating dance of the mighty serpents that lay hidden under the deeps across the long ages but are now free to live where they were meant to live. But I find no answers there and so I travel on.

I cross the deserts on the camels of ancient cities once thought lost to the sands. Now found risen as these cities dream of the oasis’s that once were in this broken land of forgotten dust and dunes. Their peoples walk for miles taking with them everything that loved and breathed, and all that was left lying ignored to the wastes of the desert people. I meet the caravans of those that traverse these deserts bringing silks and gold and things unseen on each side of these barren wastes. I meet scavengers searching for the bones and ashes of travelers who never took precautions for the cold dangers of desert nights and the lonely animals that hunt in them. For even here there are creatures that live and need meat and blood of living creatures to survive.

I talk to the caliphs and concubines of the cities of the desert but they have nothing to tell, they lived, they were forgotten, and they returned from whence those of the forgotten went. Only to come back with the siren call of the deserts their home. They built their cities of sand amid the lonely wells of this loneliest of lands. For it is such a lonely land where days might pass without the sight of a living thing, and sometimes even a month will pass without sight of another mortal man. But the caravans are used to this life and tell tales to pass the time, tales that no man who has never been across the sands will ever hear. But even in these tales I find no answers and so I travel on.

I visit the farmlands of the countries of the gentle people. Those people who live their quiet lives of crops and seasons, who know that their decisions of living and dying lie in the hands of the seasons and the gods. And who pray each night to anyone who will listen, and anyone who will preach the bible or the Koran or any book, which will tell of how to survive this harsh climate. For when your survival and the survival of those around you depends upon the things you can do least about then you will listen to anybody who can talk and convince that they can speak for the seasons and the gods. But they have no time for truths of the world, and their stories are those stories that are for entertainment rather than for knowledge. Their knowledge is confined to those of farms and husbandry, of when crops can be sown and harvested, of how to predict the next day’s weather, and of how to spot an animal in heat and an animal in the throes of labour. And they have no time to wonder at the change in their lives as they have gone from those who sat and watched the events of far away to those who sit and watch those of their neighbours, and who have gone from those who lived with science to those who are afraid of witchcraft. And so I traveled on.

I walk through the deserted cities of the ancients, but not the ancients of the far times, but the ancient cities of the time before the wash. Where only savages and princes of the streets live. Where gangs of children who intend to die before becoming adults live, fighting amongst themselves for a brief moment of pleasure in their wasted lives, but never finding it before the violence that surrounds them brings them back in to itself. I search the broken libraries of shattered and decayed books which tell nothing but their own tales and those tales tell me nothing that I could ever now need to know, so I leave them to rot, those tales of the ancients from across the world and across the times, from Plato in his cave to the soap opera wastrels that were read by those who considered themselves well read by reading a newspaper. But there are no newspapers anymore they are long gone for there is no longer anyone interested in the tales of the present, and no one to write the tales of the truth of the world. And no one is interested in knowing what happened to change the world; they are too busy trying to survive. But who knows what they might find if they tried to know about themselves and their world and what has happened to this world. But I travel on knowing that there is nothing to be found in the cities and the streets but the death of the young.

And so I travel on searching ever searching for the secrets of this changed world for I sometimes feel as if I am the only one who even remembers what the world was like before, who remembers the music and the people. Who remembers the joys of the age of jazz and beat and drums and metal. But all that is now forgotten since the wash swept over the world changing everything. That mysterious thing which took the centuries and industries from the world that looked at us it seemed and found us wanting, and I alone remember swimming in it and feeling even myself changing. I remember what is now forgotten about the period of change as the world cried tears of rage at what they had lost. And at what they now had.

I watched as the old ones who had lived among us in ancient days came back to reclaim their ancient lands from those who had claimed them without purpose. I remember crying at the first sight of these new lands that had effortlessly conquered the old, without a battle, without a war, without even a statement announcing the battle had begun it was over. Even now I am unsure who won, maybe the earth, maybe the lonely people who had dreamed of starting over. Or the elves and fairies, and all those other who had dwelt in the lands out of sight of man just waiting for mans dominion to end as all things must end that lives for so short a time as man.

But now my story must end here but not my quest for answers that it seems must never ever end. And I must travel on listening to the tales of gods and men, piecing together the fragments and mystery of the wash and hoping someday to find out the reason for it all. For I know that somewhere there must be a reason and I vow to myself, and to all those that I once knew and that once lived, and to all those that now live little lives of quiet despair, and for the children of the new world that is our future that I will find it. And I will, or keep searching until the end of time and the world.

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