THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#1)

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words
A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World

The circumstances surrounding my first death
At the time of my first death I was twenty years old. I lived with my two sisters in a rustic cabin deep in the inland forests of the duchy of Sequoia on the farthest edge of the western lands. The name of our settlement was Frog Creek.
In the wake of the Great Miasma, that strange experience out of which our great-great grandparents emerged, a tremendous confusion about the past invaded the hearts and minds of those who found themselves alive and dwelling in our land. What had happened to the mighty civilization whose ruins we scavenged for the scraps and rubbish we built our lives around? Why were its power sources, and the knowledge that made them possible, lost to us? What had become of the vast invisible realm, sustained by the same natural force as lightning in the sky, that held all this society’s wisdom and allowed its citizens to communicate with each other through the ether? Why did so many suffer physical deformity from birth or fall ill from tumors later in life? No one remembered. Memory had vanished along with that ether storehouse the former world had entrusted with all the knowledge of its own workings.
People became heartsick and discouraged pondering these questions that had no answers. With the ether storehouse lost, we turned to that other invisible realm, the world of Light and Love, for solace. Against the pervading corruption of heart and air we called the Great Miasma, we had visions and formed Giver Houses dedicated to receiving those visions. Though we could read and (far less frequently) write, our relations with Giver were not considered something to make into a scripture. Since that kind of record risked making holy thought perishable, the Giver tradition was oral. For navigating the world around us, however, our only compass was in fact archaic and often unsatisfactory printbooks (for the great civilization that preceded us had abandoned print long before the Great Miasma) explaining how to make simple houses, furniture, buggies—anything that could be handcrafted and did not require the power sources of pre-Miasma times. We could read these works that were recorded in the same script we used, but we felt no sense of connection with those who had produced them.

(we will continue tomorrow)