52. The Ages Of Sand, Again

In the sixth age of sand, there were seven billion clever apes roaming the world, calling themselves ‘people.’ The term meant ‘every single one of us, more or less,’ which is not uncommon for ‘people.’ Before the ‘people,’ the world belonged to towering haired mammals that were inured to the cold. Before them, the world was owned by birds, then before that, and before that, and before that, and before that ever backwards. The world is a big thing, and it was hard to say who owned them, but the ‘people’ were just another category of ‘people’ that had built things on the world like language and time and money.

The parasites and diseases and the trees all over the world that had happily spread themselves and cared very little for the fast-moving creatures of the world were not consulted as to the ownership of the world.

The world was a strange place, in the sixth age of sand. There were smartphones to record people’s runic magic. There were small countries with large natural reserves of magical history, connected to their contiguous social constructs like monarchy and cultural habit. There were people who had magical colours and there were nations with no history who used huge, open stretches of blank land to carve runes to create magical patterns thousands of times over to enable a better world. There were fights, and there were conflicts, but it only took a little bit of time for people to adjust, and adapt. The world was a place of information, now, and so it didn’t need much magic to change entirely. Children born before the internet had learned to use it every day; Children born before magic’s return learned to use it just as well.

There was legislation. There were discussions. There were collaborations. Roaming ghosts of remembered species took back parts of the wild, and started to fill the empty regions of the world that ‘people’ had deemed too hard to work. People lived their lives, wondering if they were capable of meeting the world that was going to come, the change they had now seen, in part.

The world was a strange place, in the sixth age of sand. Wasn’t it always?