The stories we told were all the old stories that spoke of the world before this one. The stories of the paradise we'd lost. The Story Priests tell us tales of that old life we died and left behind, that place of paradise where life was long, easy and free. Stories of a time long before this one.
The Story Priests say that we are born into this life when we die in that paradise. Some ask: why – if it is a paradise – then why do we die? The priests respond that we must have done something wrong there, and so we are reborn here in this dark, grey, land as a punishment for all we did wrong in that old life.
The Story Priests then point to the ruins, now almost lost under the growing grass and heaping earth that almost buries them. They tell us the story of the Great Devil that arose in the Distant East. How it sundered this land from the paradise we once lived in and that now all those of us who failed in that paradise are reborn here.
Some, if not most of us, do not believe these stories, even though we learn of them from when we are young enough to listen. I look around the fires at night-time, watching the faces of the people as the Story Priests go through the rituals of the Telling. Each time I see eyes that do not believe, eyes that see this world and those ruins and wonder what kind of paradise this used to be. We sit, shivering in the rain and the cold, hoping the fire will last the night. We know – deep down – this, or any life before this, was never any paradise.
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