History Endeth Thus

The great trees rode the wind, catching mad air on enormous silken sails, and the treeriders sailed with them, from the shores of the wooded and mysterious Lost Coast of the North, where the jade and the rivers and the Redwoods were, all the way across the great dry desert of the Southwest above deep crimson-red canyons and towers, all the way to the High Mountains of the West that touched the sky and hid many magical kingdoms, and on the eastern side of these high mountains, which eternally caught the reddening dawn of the rising of the Great Eastern Sun, the treeriders landed their great trees, Sequoia Sempervirens, enormous rootballs gently bouncing to a slow rest as the mighty sails wrapped overhead to form a great pavilion, about which the treeriders began playing music and beneath which both treeriders and root gnomes began the immediate work of creating a self-cleaning ecology: microclimate planting, drainage and irrigation, compost and heat.

They'd come from beyond the great Ocean of the West, riding mighty giant whales across the seas of the forever setting Great Western Sun, singing deep, mythical songs of an ancient Time and an eternal and omnipresent Way. Beyond fear, beyond laughter, beyond time and space, the songs reverberated with implacable and unerring harmonic convergence, ushering in a new Age and a bold, deathless, new and forever-remembered way of being. They sang songs of an intelligence long forgotten and never extinguishable, songs without language, songs of the Myth of Time. And with them rode the Death of the Kali Yuga.

They were immortals, avatars incarnate, all-victorious beings transcendent over victory itself. They were beyond conflict: from their communal and collaborative spirit rang the invincible resonance of the one truth of One Love. The Whales had said they were going to leave, but at the last second they stuck around for the show and the trees had actually been waiting patiently this whole time, it turns out. Redwoods loved to go sailing; they were really good at it.

The treeriders landed, and explained to the ecstatic crowd that no, Bastante wasn't with them. He'd sailed South on his tree, following the coastline, and only a few treeriders had sailed with him. Don't worry, he's coming, they kept saying, and avoided the topic of when. The main expeditionary force wasn't going to cross the Desert this winter; some kind of logistical problem; they said. Maybe in the spring. The treeriders shook their heads; a lot of worked needed to get done and there wasn't much History left.

Motivation to culturally transmogrify was low in South Kali-Land, where the living was already ridiculously easy and no one ever had any real reason to complain, or change. Bastante was going to speak out for action in South Kali-Land, in the heart of Mordor, Santa Babylon. He was going to speak motivationally, and rally the indefatigable Babylonians. Needless to say, he was terrified.

little did anyone anticipate the events that happened next...