Green World Stories

[SA]

A very, very long time ago there weren't many trees left in the world.

Where did they do?

We chopped them up for firewood and turned them into paper - that's something we wrote on before we had holograms. We even made our houses out of them.

That's terrible! Did we hate them?

No, no. We just didn't know them. They didn't speak and they couldn't cry so we thought they weren't really alive.

Why didn't they speak? Were they too sad to cry?

Yes, they were. Way back even before we could speak the mothers and fathers of the trees went into the sky on their flying mountains and left their children alone. That made them very sad.

Why would they do that?

There was something they were afraid of, and they couldn't take the trees with them. They went to other stars to find a way to beat the thing that was scaring them.

Did they do it? Is that why the trees can talk again?

No. They realised that what they had done was wrong and their children would be lost without them. So they came back even though they didn't know the answer to their question. They loved the trees most of all, you see.

[SA]

In the morning the children gather by the flier (which they have painted with the names and deeds of the heroes in their teacher's stories) and sing a song for their unseen counterparts. The teacher is adamant that the song be sung in its proper form but the children, whose minds already wander in the beckoning skies, sing loudly and rudely and laugh at their own rhyme. As they board the flier the teacher casts an apologetic look toward the shrine where, unseen but not unfelt, the little spirits are smiling.

When the big blue lizard clambers down the fog-wet stones and snatches a lamb in its jaws, or savages a shepherd who has come to the creature's defence (always fleeing before his companions arrive, for it knows that they fear it and will not travel alone), the hill people watch from their hidden enclosures and do nothing. They are slow in thought and cautious in action. Once, three drunk men came into the hills from the valley town and threatened village women with knives until they surrendered themselves. The hill people did nothing then, but when the villains stumbled back toward their town they were followed by vast shadows and destroyed.

There are always people coming and going from the big sky bay at the top of the city. They come from the blue lands and the high lands and the flat lands, the lands of beetles and bugs and the lands of the jealous chimeras. Sometimes they come all the way from the moon, which looks much like the earth must look when seen from the stars. Those people wear suits like soldiers wear, or the ones that are worn to travel underwater and see the great shark kings and the coral palaces. Their bones are brittle because the burden of the moon is gentle, as is its Lady, and so the moon people are called beautiful, as so many things are that humans cannot but destroy by their touch.

[ooc]Hmm, what's this? I have no idea![/ooc]

[Steerpike]

[blockquote=Spacious Angles/Saalcious Angel]Hmm, what's this? I have no idea![/blockquote]

Lyrical space opera with a dash of Tolkienesque environmentalism in a neo-pastoral technomystic future?

[SA]

Substitute Miyazaki for Tolkien and that sounds pretty much spot on.

[SA]

Green World Stories

In short, a future reclaimed by forgotten beings who once departed for the stars.

Hovercraft, holograms, elementals, rice farmers, wind power, love magic, blood pacts, synthetic manservants and great slumbering worms in the bones of mountains. That's the setting.

A little boy wandered into the wood on the far side of his father's field and discovered a stream of water so clear and clean it seemed unstirring though its current was fierce. On the far side of that stream he saw a familiar girl, her hair woven with brambles and copper wire, her unclothed body painted with mud. She turned her head askance and watched the boy as birds do, with a staring eye that might have betrayed hunger, or spoke of warning. Though young, the boy knew the portents of the wild places. He fled in tears, and the girl's image raised up a despairing hand at his departure.