The Third Age

There were three beginnings before the beginning you know, sweetling. We speak of the ages of mankind. You live in the fourth. You know nothing else. You open your mouth to object, but your voice dies to flickers of a failing memory, something communal, something seizing in the primal swamps between dreaming and waking.

The first two ages are lost to you, faded even from the imprints of your DNA. But the Third Age sits on the tip of sub-consciousness – the age of technology – the seafaring people plundering the fallen ziggurats and fused cathedrals of the toxic Second Age – the rising laboratories and factories – machines fuelled by anima – the golden clockworks – the spinning cogs and glow…

No. It is gone. You remembered too hard, and it slipped like sand between the fingers. Yet you look upon the greatest of technological marvels of your society, and somewhere in your deep mind, you know it is barely a shade of something that came before, as faded as the frantic shadows burnt into Hiroshima’s walls.