We shall begin our survey of the Aftermath with Gerodacles, the
biological son of Vylyrades. No more than a small child at the time of
the Great Cataclysm, Gerodacles and his mother Crynaria survived the
total destruction of the Svart city in which they were sheltering by a
bare margin, when the underground city was flooded by a river that was
diverted in the upheavals of the Cataclysm. [2]

Gerodacles came to manhood in northern Europe, in a landscape
devastated by tsunamis, and spent much of his adult life struggling to
master the intricacies of subsistence farming and combat, because
violence was a fact of life in the harsh post-apocalyptic world of the
48th Century B.C.  As a survivor of Atlantis, he wielded enormous
psionic powers, which were of great use to him and the other
survivors, and at the age of 17 he married a 14 year old fellow
Atlantean survivor, and they had six children over the course of their
life.  He became the leader of a small settlement of surviving
Atlanteans and commoners who gathered around them on a patch of
relatively fertile land in what would someday be northern France.

Let us take a slightly closer look at the descendents of Gerodacles,
who inherited the leadership of the little community.

Dyvyleri (4683 B.C.)...
---------------------------------

The summer heat was unbearable...as usual.  As Dyvyleri looked out
over the parched fields, with their sad crops, he sighed.  Though in
some ways life had become easier in recent decades, but the summers
were hotter and the winters colder.  Throughout much of the previous
winter, Dyvyleri and his fellow psions had been forced to use their
abilities constantly to aid their small community, all 305 of them, to
endure the winter.  Only about eighty members of the community were
born of the exiles of lost Atlantis, with the power that was the
birthright of such, the rest were the offspring of Atlanteans and
commoners, some of whom had the gift of power and some of whom did
not, and none of whom appeared to as strong as the pure-bloods.

As he pondered how many workers they could spare to attempt to dig an
irrigation ditch from the nearby river, and wondered whether the
drought would hold long enough to make the work worthwhile, a part of
him remembered his grandmother Cyrnaria’s stories of Atlantis, and the
wonders of the world she had lived in before the great Downfall.  As a
small boy, Dyvyleri had listened raptly to those stories, and
sometimes he thought of them as an adult, but mostly there was no time
to dwell on them.  They had to live in the world of the present, the
past was the past, his grandmother had been dead for fifty years, his
father Gerodacles

He looked back up at the sky, it was clear, blue, and utterly
cloudless, and sweat poured down his face as he shaded his eyes from
the Sun.  He had to decide that day whether they would attempt to dig
that ditch, or gamble that the rain would come soon enough to make it
unnecessary.  He walked toward the river, past the thin fir and pine
trees and still thinner hardwoods that were growing between their
fields and the river, turning what had been a tsunami-leveled plain
into a young forest interspersed with fields and settlements.

Sylarias (4591 B.C.)...
---------------------------------

Sylarias cursed in spite of his best efforts to maintain a stoic
exterior.  As his friend and chief healer Shalvar bound up the wound,
he could not help but react to the pain in spite of the mental block
he was maintaining against the pain.  There was just no way to help
it, the arrow that had penetrated his arm had been tipped with a bit
of razor-sharp jagged stone and had left a nasty, jagged wound.  His
arm would be slow to heal and he would be lame in combat for some
time.

It could have been worse, though.  At least his Power had been
sufficient to deflect the arrow a little, so that it did not penetrate
his chest, and he knew how to use his Power to make wounds heal a
little faster than they did for lesser folk.  Still, he would have to
hope the raiders did not return soon, five of the people with Power
had been slain in this latest attack on the settlement and its stores
of food, and six capable young men who’s labor and farming skills they
could not spare.

Times were growing darker, he knew his grandfather Dyvyleri, with far
greater Power, could have slain the bowman before he ever got within
striking range, but Sylarias, though he had inherited the Power from
his grandfather, could match neither his range nor his strength, nor
did he know how to do everything his grandfather and father had known
how to do, since both had died of the mysterious wasting disease when
Sylarias had been but thirteen summers old.  They had not had time to
teach him all they knew about the strange Power their family and a few
others possessed, and having come to the Headship of their community
at such a young age, Sylarias had had little time to learn anything
but the lore of farming and of necessity of late, the lore of
fighting.

Once, or so he had been told, raiders had been rare, and easily dealt
with.  According to the oldest dwellers in their village, when his
great-grandfather and grandfather had been young, there had been many
people in the village with the Power, and the few raiders who dared
attack were disposed of without mercy.  Now there many raiders, men
and a few women who survived by preying on the farmers and herders and
fisherfolk near the coast, and who carried off animals and women for
their own use.

Sylarias remembered hearing his grandfather say once that the men and
women with the Power had come from a land far beyond the great
Ocean...but he was not sure he quite believed that.  Gazing out across
the ocean, it was sometimes hard to imagine that it even had a far
shore.  Certainly his grandfather had told some wild tales to
entertain around the council fire, and he could tell the tallest tales
with an utterly straight face.  For a time, in his naive youth,
Dyvyleri had had Sylarias convinced that the very Earth was round, a
ball, and that if one walked in one direction long enough one would
find oneself back where one started.

Even amid the pain of the wound, Sylarias laughed at himself for
believing such obvious absurdity, even when he was only six summers
old.

MORE LATER.

[1] See the rather extensive ‘Atlantis and Cataclysm’ thread, and note
that almost nobody _knew_ what Vylyrades did or why.

Shrondir  (4481 B.C.)...
---------------------------------

Shrondir dropped his load onto the pile with a sigh of relief.  He
looked to the sky, which was gray-white with the coming snows, already
the north wind blew, chilling the very bones.  If his weather-lore was
any guide, by the rising of the Sun there would be many inches of snow
on the frozen ground.  The weather had spoken of snow for many days,
like most of his people Shrondir was long practiced at reading the
little signs that spoke of coming changes.  The able-bodied men and
women of the community had been preparing, Shrondir himself had spent
most of the day gathering wood for his own hearth fire and to keep his
three wives and their children alive through the cold nights that were
now due.

Shrondir was young, seventeen summers old, and had become the Headman
of their village two years before after his father had perished from a
snakebite.  Shrondir’s father had been headman for many decades, ever
since the death of Shrondir’s great-grandfather Sylarias, long before
his birth.  Shrondir’s grandfather had died in battle, before ever
becoming Headman.

Inside, Shrondir placed some dried wood on the circular stone hearth,
and stared hard at it, calling on his magical Power as he had been
taught, and with great effort, and a strain that left his head
slightly aching, he lit the first dry kindling ablaze, and began to
feed it with larger bits of wood.

He smiled a little, he knew it was his possession of the blessing of
the magical Power that marked him as the rightful Headman, but he
could not help but think that it was almost more work to use the magic
than it was to simply start the fire the conventional way, but it
simply would not due to be seen using flint, not for the Headman.  It
was not done.

The old folk spoke of a time when the magic was stronger, when the
great-grandsires of the Blessed Ones had been able to do much more
with the magic, and so even could their some of their wives.  Shrondir
could scarcely imagine that, his own mother had been one of his
father’s two wives, and both had been utterly without magic, though he
was told his father’s mother’s father had once had it.

Shrondir did not know whether or not to take such stories seriously.
At times he wondered how they could possibly be true, given how
exhausting it was to start a fire in dry wood, or open a ceremonial
village council by shutting the doors of the village longhouse by will
alone, and how much _easier_ and faster it always was to do things the
ordinary way, surely such stories were merely fireside tales, like
those wild stories that once there were villages many times the size
of even their prosperous community, with its two hundred souls.  That
was surely nonsense, considering how much work and effort was needed
to feed two hundred people, it was impossible to imagine villages ten
times that size as the tales suggested.

The fire was growing warmer, and the house grew as comfortable as any
house in winter could ever be.

Trethar  (4306 B.C.)...
---------------------------------

Trethar knew he would not live through the night.  The wounds were too
severe, and he was too old.

Trethar was not so bothered by this as he would once have been, he was
after all very old, and at least he thought perhaps he would not
longer feel any pain soon.  At the ripe age of sixty summers,
Trethar’s body was all but helpless with age, sickness, and the wounds
he had taken in the battle with the other tribe.  He had survived many
a battle since he had been taken as a child from that warm village on
the coast, and later adopted into the tribe of Warriors that had taken
him from a village he could barely remember now.  He had risen to
become a Great Warrior, a counselor of the First Warrior, and had led
many a raid himself for food, slaves, and women.

Trethar dimly remembered his childhood in that village, now on this
last night of his life.  He dimly recalled that his father had been
the headman of the village, and his older brother would have been, but
he had no idea if that had ever happened or not, and he little cared.
He remembered the silly stories in the village, though.  He had not
thought about those days in many a year, but now the memories flitted
through his mind on this last night.

He almost laughed, there had been some silly story that his family had
some kind of magic, but the fact that the Tribe had burned half the
village and taken many of the women and children, even he himself, was
proof enough of the silliness of such things.  The only magic he
believed in was that of the great Spirits the Tribe worshipped, and of
course his battle hammer.  Now _there_ was a magic that could be
relied upon.

Trethar lay on the soft grass of the great plain, they were many many
miles from the coast now, the Tribe had wandered inland long before,
seeking more vulnerable targets, having largely taken what was worth
taking near the coast.  The weather was mild, and the stars were
blazing overhead.  It was not a bad way to go, Trethar mused, not a
bad sight to see before dying.

Not far away, his oldest acknowledged son waited, as was the custom,
to claim his father’s battle hammer and trophy belt when he departed.
Trethar had eighteen sons whom he acknowledged, by various slaves and
concubines he had earned as his status in the Tribe rose, several of
them were now Great Warriors themselves.  He suspected there were
other men of the Tribe who might be his, as well.  He would die this
night, but the Tribe would carry on with part of him in it, and that
was good.

Trethar closed his eyes...and did not open them again.

In the immediate aftermath of the Cataclysm, Earth's climate balance
oscillated wildly, at least on a human scale.  The Familiar Eldren had
done a fairly good job of 'stabilizing' matters on a macro-scale, so
that over a period of centuries the climate returned to its former
interglacial equilibrium, or rather to something approximating that.
The global average temperature rose sharply, accelerating the melt of
the remaining glacial fields in the high northern latitudes, followed
by a downward spike that last for over a century of bitter winters and
short, damp springs all over the northern hemisphere, adding to the
trend of the ongoing population crash.

In spite of the cold snap, however, the surge of heat and energy from
the Cataclysm proved to be the greater force, and the melt
accelerated, slowed by the cold snap but not stopped, and the cold
century was followed by two centuries of warmer temperatures in the
upper latitudes, multiplied by the increased force of the Gulf Stream,
now reaching the northern latitudes more easily for the lack of the
Island of Atlantis in the path, carrying an additional dose of
hundreds of terawatts of thermal energy.  As the ice melted back, the
world-wide sea level rose somewhat, flooding out additional
continental shelf lands and reducing the area of islands around the
world.

Before the Cataclysm, the islands of Bermuda were the center of Flux
research, military and civilian, for the entire civilization, and the
ongoing work of the Great Project only made this the more so, which in
turn made Bermuda the epicenter of the wild paranormal manifestations
that accompanied the geological upheaval of the Cataclysm.  The
arrival of the vast tsunamis that washed across Bermuda were almost a
null issue, every living thing on the island had been slain already by
the psychic energies at play.  So intense was the psychokinetic vortex
that manifested over the Bermuda region that thousands of buildings,
structures, and various mechanisms were reduced to dust and powder in
a matter of minutes.

In South America, volcanic explosions blasted up and down the volcanic
reaches of the Andes, and earthquakes rippled across much of the
eastern region, but the vast basin of the Amazon River was less
extremely affected than much of the world, and the hidden Refuge
Vylyrades and his allies had founded managed to survive the Cataclysm
in their well-built and well-situated hidden community, deep within
the jungle-covered wilderness.  Even before the Cataclysm, that area
of South America had been remote, now it was almost empty of human
life for hundreds of miles around, it would be some time before it was
repopulated and in the short-to-medium term the inhabitants of the
Refuge were safe and secure, and indeed positioned to live a much more
comfortable life than most of the survivors in a world laid in ruins.

The Refuge was well-equipped, with a population of over two hundred
and fifty Atlanteans and trained, knowledgeable commoners, protected
by isolation, walls, and terrain, with extensive agriculture knowledge
and large stores of supplies and equipment, and a Great Library
assembled by Vylyrades and the Rhaemyi at great effort for many years
before the Cataclysm.  They were thus well-positioned to endure...for
a time.

The observation facility NEMESIS had maintained underwater off the
eastern coast of Atlantis had been destroyed in the first hours of the
Cataclysm.  Because of its concerns with secrecy, NEMESIS had been
forced to plant its observation platforms with extreme care and there
were huge gaps in the coverage.  The only observation units at all
conveniently placed were a handful of hidden stations on the nearside
of the Moon, placed there over the millennia by what had been
carefully calculated to appear to be ordinary meteoric impacts.  The
necessities of such secrecy in turn limited what equipment NEMESIS
could put in place, which in turn meant that when the Cataclysm began,
NEMESIS had limited ability to observe events.

The automated facilities _did_ record what they could of events, which
was limited both by the available facilities and the insane conditions
on Earth’s surface.  Video records in a number of bands of the
spectrum were possible and recorded, but cloud cover rapidly covered
much of the Earth as the Cataclysm unfolded, and other sensors were
more limited, and there was a total lack of _active_ sensing for
reasons of secrecy.

As the Cataclysm unfolded, events began to propagate into space as
well, the various phenomena of the Earth's lithosphere, hydrosphere,
and atmosphere could not do so, of course, but the paranormal effects
derived of a spasming, maddened Flux could and did reach beyond the
Earth, with sufficient intensity that moonquakes were induced,
destroying three of the precious observation stations.  The surviving
stations duly noted these effects, and then that the effects were
spreading and producing ‘sympathic’ events on Mars and Venus.  These
recordings were sent to NEMESIS on the next regularly scheduled
‘concealed shuttle’, when what seemed to be a medium-period comet came
dropping into the inner Solar System, well over a century after the
Cataclysm itself had occurred.

Thus it was not until what a later time would call the year 4623 B.C.
that NEMESIS learned of the Cataclysm, the destruction of Atlantis,
the population crash on Earth, and the return of the Familiar Eldren.

NEMESIS was no as close to being stunned as it was capable of being
when it processed the data, in half a billion years it had never
encountered phenomena like what its limited on-site sensors were
reporting had happened on Earth in 4750 B.C.  It devoted a great deal
of thought and computer time to analysis, but the most important
single fact of the entire event, from the point of view of NEMESIS,
was that the Eldren had reappeared to bring the entire catastrophe
under control.

One of NEMESIS’ prime imperatives was hiding itself from the Eldren.
It had seen no trace or sign of Eldren activity near any Solarigen
world in sixty-seven thousand years, but in an ongoing contest that
had endured since the Ordovician Period, sixty millennia was hardly
significant, at no point had NEMESIS considered the absence sufficient
to justify reducing its stealth profile, and now it found this
confirmed, because it had just observed the Eldren act in a major way
to prevent a mass extinction.

As NEMESIS began to process the information it had managed to record
on Earth, reports began to come in from elsewhere in the Galaxy that
something very odd seemed to be happening.

Recall that one of the things that happened just before the super-
tsunami effect wiped out almost all macro-scale life in Atlantis was
that an involuntary, nearly universal telepathic gestalt formed, a
gestalt that contained almost every adult and adolescent mind in
Atlantis, as well as spreading outward for a few second to engulf a
huge swath of Atlantean-descended individuals around the world, and
some commoners as well.  The gestalt lasted only a few minutes, but
was awesomely powerful while it lasted, yet totally undirected because
of the lack of any coordinating force or common goal other than the
desire to 'not die' and a permeating fear.

This gestalt would have various effects, some of which we will address
later, one of which we shall address right now.  The gestalt was
enabled, and part of, the vastly complex mesh of psionic and Flux
effects unleashed during the early stages of the Cataclysm, which were
in turn interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field, the Sun’s
magnetic fields, and other natural phenomena.  One of the upshots of
this was that a series of spherical ‘wave-fronts’ were generated,
centered on Earth and expanding outward at the velocity of information
for various orders of existence, propagating through the Flux.  The
strength of the nested wave-fronts varied up and down, the strongest
propagated at the 8th order of effect, meaning it propagated at a
velocity of eight to the eighth power times c, or over sixteen million
times light-speed.  This was the wave that had the primary effect.

This wave formed and expanded at almost the exact height of the
Cataclysm, carrying within its psychic structure the imprint of
millions of Atlanteans in the moment of their death, along with other
humans and other living creatures ‘caught up’ in the psychic effect.
It would be thousands of years before a sufficient grasp of paranormal
science could be combined with advanced ‘conventional’ science to
properly model the event, and the details would remain elusive for
much longer.

The effect, however, was immediate.

In _far_ less than the blink of an eye, the primary shock wave swept
across the Solar System, including the planet Mercury, where in its
aftermath the living ‘crystal-structures’ that the Eldren ‘Hermes’ had
been painstakingly preparing suddenly began to display a much more
complex level of self-directed behavior.

In about five minutes and a few seconds, the wave front crossed a
world rich with Solarigen life, almost all of which lived in the
oceans or floated in the mid-air, supported by great air pockets,
natural ‘living blimps’, one breed of these living blimps suddenly
changed their collective and individual behavior as the wave front
swept past.

At time plus seventeen minutes and twelve seconds, the wave-front
passed through a star system harboring two Solarigen worlds, one a
dry, hot globe orbiting the primary, the other a satellary body of a
gas giant, entirely covered by ocean.  On the later, a species evolved
from transplanted Cetacean stock suddenly experienced a remarkable
collective shock:  they realized that they existed and knew that they
knew this.

At time plus twenty-four minutes almost exactly, the wave-front passed
a sophisticated monitoring station that detected its presence,
analyzed some small elements of its nature, and sent off a messenger-
starship that same day to bear the news to the entity which had
arranged for the construction of the monitor site.

At time plus forty-six minutes and thirty-two seconds, the wave-front
intersected a world dominated by a variety of species descended from
Terran ants.  When it passed, a new kind of biosphere was left in its
wake, the behavior of multiple species changed radically.

At time plus one hour, six minutes and three seconds, the wave-front
crossed a Helian Graveyard, and actually managed to stir some of the
somnolent entities to take an interest in its passing.

At time plus seven hours and thirteen minutes and a few seconds more,
the wave-front crossed a world where a globe-girdling fungal
superorganism had existed for hundreds of millions of years, when it
passed, a new sapient being had awakened to awareness of its own
existence and the Universe which it occupied.

At time plus forty-four hours, close enough, the wave-front swept
across a Solarigen world dominated almost entirely, at least in the
niches of the Animal Kingdom, but various types of birds.  Here too,
the psychic impact made major changes that would be of great
significance in later times.

The wave-front swept onward, out through the satellite galaxies of the
Milky Way and beyond, fading in intensity as it went.  The instances
we have glanced at are only a handful of examples of its passing, as
it swept outward it interacted with _millions_ of places, usually in
trivial ways, sometimes in ways of great import, occasionally in ways
that changed the entire course of the history of a planet.

The Watcher, once the immediate danger of mass extinction was passed,
rapidly began to fall back into the torpor that characterized all the
Eldren caught by the Rival's misfired trap tens of thousands of years
before.

However, before it completely slipped back into its normal state of
near-unconsciousness, the Watcher found sufficient focus to take a
last few steps.  It had managed, at the last possible moment, to open
an escape route for Zadatharion, Aradel, and a handful of their
Rhaemyi followers, permitting them to escape from Atlantis before the
Cataclysm made life there impossible.

Now the Watcher, seeing that the human civilization that had arisen
over the previous few thousand years was utterly destroyed, decided
that its Avatar and the Avatars of the other trapped Familiar Eldren
should have a refuge, a place to go to disappear when need be, or to
conceal things from the normal humans and other Homosentients around
them.  The Watcher gave the necessary instructions to the Familiar
Eldren during the brief time window in which they were allowed to act
on Earth, and they followed the instructions during the few centuries
in which they removed Atlantis as a land mass and otherwise altered
the Earth to make it more stable in the future.

In the northern Pacific Ocean, the Watcher selected a small
archipelago of islands, the remnant of a former ‘hot spot’ that had
long since faded away, and the Familiar Eldren reshaped it, a trivial
matter for beings of such staggering power and abilities.  This
islands were a great distance from any near neighbors and the
surrounding continents, located in the north temperate zone, and when
the Familiar Eldren were finished with the archipelago, it had been
radically altered to make it more suitable for the requirements of the
Watcher.

The Watcher itself retained sufficient ‘focus’ to complete the task,
directing what little of its awakened power it could still marshal to
transform the largest of the reengineered islands for a very special
purpose.  When this was done, the time window during which the
Familiar Eldren could work on Earth was closing, it was rapidly
approaching the point when the Edict would resume its binding force.

Then the Watcher turned its attention once more to its primary Avatar,
Zadatharion, who at that time was dwelling and operating in the wild
lands of what would one day be the land of the Ukraine.

The psi-gate through which Zadatharion, Aradel, and their fellow
survivors had escaped had bridged the distance from southern Atlantis
to a remote stretch of what would one day be Russia, deep in the taiga
forest that girdled much of the northern hemisphere.  Thousands of
miles from Atlantis, they were nevertheless battered by the effects of
the Cataclysm, no place on Earth remained untouched.  Storms, winds,
earthquake and rain, paranormal manifestations and worse threatened
them even there during the dark and mad weeks of the Cataclysm.  They
were, however, in one of the safer areas of the Earth, relatively
speaking, and all the tiny group of survivors came through the
Cataclysm alive.

The Watcher had even chosen, through some perception of awareness, to
put them down in an area from which they could make their way overland
to the hidden vales where the Rhaemyi original bases were to be found,
even as late as the 4750s those first hidden bases remained in use as
‘safe houses’ of a sort, far from the dangers of Atlantis and the
centers of civilization.  Now they provided a refuge for the remaining
Rhaemyi who could reach them, altogether nearly two hundred members of
the secret society survived the Cataclysm and managed to reach that
hidden refuge, though it took some of them many years. [1]

Zadatharion and Aradel were unsure of exactly how they had managed to
escape from Atlantis.  Aradel remembered the events, but she had not
_caused_ them, and Zadatharion could remember nothing of it, not even
telling his followers that the psi-gate was about to manifest or to
use it, though the words had certainly left his lips.  Neither Avatar
truly understood his or her own nature, and all they could conclude
about what had happened was that they could reach no conclusions.

Now, though, as time passed, something new began to happen.  It began
about two centuries after the Cataclysm, when Zadatharion and Aradel
found themselves subject to a strange but irresistible urge to travel
away from where they had come to rest on the borders of Europe and
Asia, toward the east.

What followed was a nearly epic overland journey, through a world
still in the chaos and wreckage of the post-Cataclysmic period.  The
cities, technology, paranormal abilities, and organization and
communication and transportation so readily available a few centuries
before were gone now, much of the world thrown back into a neolithic
state, and the trip across Asia was long and difficult and not without
its dangers, even for such awesomely powerful entities as Zadatharion
and Aradel.

Even though these two retained their full psionic power and skill,
even they were weaker than they had been before the Cataclysm, because
something basically important had changed:  the Flux was absent.

The Cataclysm had been, in many ways, a Flux-event.  After it ended,
and the world settled down, those individuals possessing Flux skills
found that the permeating psychic presence of the Universe had either
withdraw, or was refusing to respond to any attempt at contact, much
less use.  Potent Flux-based devices that had survived the Cataclysm
were inert (or mostly so).  Fluxons who before the Cataclysm had been
powerful enough to shake mountains were now left only with their
native psi faculty, if they had one.

What had happened was that the Flux, driven into an unstable state
before the Cataclysm, had simply been ‘nulled’ by the Eldren, to give
it time to calm and return to a stable state.  In time, the Flux would
again respond to those with the appropriate skills, but that time was
still many centuries distant.

As they traveled eastward across Asia, other Avatars, impelled by the
same incomprehensible and all but irresistible urge, joined them.
Some of them Zadatharion had encountered before down the millennia,
others were new to him.  All discovered, as Aradel had already, that
they had a natural tendency to follow Zadatharion’s leadership, and
all were driven eastward across Asia, joined as they traveled by
others of their kind, coming upward from Africa, from the Indian
subcontinent, from Europe, south from the far north of Asia and the
remnants of the former Arctic communities of the Antediluvian Age. [2]
[3]

MORE LATER.

[1] Of course, for every surviving member of the Rhaemyi who made it
back to the hidden valleys, there were many who tried and failed, or
made no effort, simply abandoning their past in an effort to survive
where they were.

[2] The Watcher had made contact with the other half-awake Familiar
Eldren, and all of them had their various Avatars (some had more than
one) moving toward various rendezvous sites.  The Avatars knew  none
of this, they only knew they had a need to travel and not why.

Yet another survivor of the Cataclysm needs to be noted, and indeed
the means of that survival was not so different than that of
Zadatharion and Aradel.

Recall that the ‘birth’ of the collective entity that we have called
the Unity was a result, in part, of genuine accident, in part of a
misfired plan on the part of several powerful telepaths in Atlantis,
and in part also of a subtle intervention on the part of the Rival.
The Unity came into being in part as the Rival’s answer to the
‘Avatars’ being created by the Familiar Eldren, and for the same
purpose.  The Rival harbored hopes of using the Unity as a tool to
free itself from its own misfired trap. [1]

The Unity, with all its ‘components’ gathered at the central node of
the Great Project, was thus assembled at the very ‘ground zero’ of the
Great Cataclysm, and when the overloaded Ultimate Paralens exploded,
the Unity should really have been wiped from existence, its multi-
century existence brought to a final end.  In fact, this was very
nearly the case.

However, just as the Watcher had sensed something of the catastrophe
to come, by means of both cognition and parasenses, so had too had the
Rival been aware of the possibility of imminent disaster.  This left
the ancient being in a somewhat divided frame of mind, to the degree
it was able to think clearly about the matter.  On the one hand, it
knew that a mass extinction on the scale that could unfold would be a
source of great frustration and anger to its enemy, the Watcher.  On
the other hand, to continue the Homosentient metaphor, the Rival knew
that this could set back its own efforts to break free by millions of
years.

In the event, the Cataclysm caught the Rival partly by surprise,
because it unfolded in a way, and sooner, than the Rival had been
expecting.  The Rival barely had time to intervene at all, even
allowing for its very limited power to do so in its trapped state.
When it realized that its primary tool, the Unity, was moments from
being extinguished entirely, the Rival acted as best it could to
preserve the collective.

All the Rival was able to manage, in the event, was to rescue on
member of the collective, a female who had not been with the others
for the purely coincidental reason that she (if we can be justified in
using the feminine pronoun for a component of the Unity) was suffering
from several wounds taken in battle prior to the final activation of
the Great Project.  She had been engaged in battle with one of
Ahkrinor’s strange multi-limbed minions, and the thing had actually
_eaten_ her right arm.

Because of that, this particular component, instead of being assembled
with the others at the center of the mechanisms, was lying in a bed
some short distance away, and the Rival managed to shield her from the
initial explosions that slew her fellow components.  The component was
one a few others so wounded as not to be assembled with the others,
but the Rival did not bother with the others because none of them
enjoyed the very specific double-qualification needed for the Rivals
purposes:  being both biologically female _and_ currently pregnant.

Recall that the Unity expanded and maintained itself by ‘imprinting’
itself on the forming brains of the offspring of its female
‘components’ during the long exposure of pregnancy.  The process
required a long exposure to the forming prenatal brain and body, such
as was possible during pregnancy when the mother was a component.

The Unity could, if it chose, _not_ imprint itself on such an
offspring, in which case the baby would be a perfectly normal
‘singleton’ human, as were all offspring of the male components,
regardless of the intent of the Unity.  The Unity desperately wished
to be able to incorporate the offspring of its male components, this
would have made the process of maintaining itself over the
generations, and growth, trivially easy, but it was never able to find
any means to make this happen.

The Unity could easily control the gender of the offspring of its
female components, and it varied its own composition between different
ratios of male and female in accordance with its changing needs.  It
so happened that toward the end of Atlantis, the Unity was mostly
male, because this simplified some of its work, and it expected to
have limitless time to expand, and even perhaps incorporate outsiders
into itself, after it succeeded in its Great Work.

This made matters harder for the Rival now, because there were not
very many female components at that time who were pregnant.  This
problem was partly offset by the Unity’s practice of using multiple
births (which it could easily induce) to make it possible to use fewer
female components for the same result.  The particular female (‘woman’
is probably not quite accurate, implying more humanity than was
present) that the Rival now chose to try and save was four months into
gestation of quadruplets.

The death of the other components of the Unity left this last female
‘member’ effectively mindless, since it had never developed any
awareness or personality of its own, swamped from before birth by the
overwhelming personality of the Unity.  This made the Rival’s task the
easier, it was almost trivial, even in its weakened state, for the
Rival to telepathically control the now-mindless component and set her
to running through the growing chaos and darkness and madness of the
early hours of the Cataclysm, guided by the outside mind of the Rival.

The Rival, caught off-guard and unready, was not as aware and
‘focused’ as the Watcher, and could not begin to manage the
complexities of a psi-gate just then.  It did, however, have far more
detailed knowledge of the doings of the Unity than the Watcher did,
and it knew where to find some small sea vessels, and even as the
Cataclysm was setting in in earnest, the controlled component of the
Unity, the last of her/its kind, put to sea aboard a craft designed to
carry a few people on a river.

In its current state, it was a major challenge for the Rival to
protect the tiny craft, as it and its mindless passenger faced an
ocean now roiled into five-hundred meter waves, winds stronger than
the greatest hurricane, and all the other elements of nature run mad,
escalating by the moment.  The Rival only just barely managed the
deed, and by the time the female washed ashore, clinging mindlessly to
the last floating bits of wreckage from the boat, she was barely alive
and her pregnancy had endured only by dint of extreme efforts on the
part of the Rival.

Survive she did, however, and she gave birth to her quadruplets,
though she did not live long thereafter.  The quadruplets, for their
part, were not _exactly_ components of the Unity.  The Unity was
dormant, nothing more than a ‘presence’ in the background of their
emerging human minds, and they grew to maturity and lived their lives
quite unaware of their background or what lurked within their own
selves.

All four quadruplets were female, and all carried this odd ‘taint’,
unaware and uncomprehending, as they grew up the post-apocalyptic
world of the later 48th century B.C.  The Rival managed to see to it
that the babies were found and raised, apart from each other, by
various groups of survivors, and after doing what it could to make
sure that the Unity remained a potential within them, the Rival sank
back into its stupor.

The four lived their hard lives, in a hard and dangerous world.  Three
of them survived long enough to reproduce, and two gave birth to
females who in turn carried the Unity-imprint within them, as did
their own daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters. [2]

As for what would come of this strange matter...

MORE LATER.

[1] Recall that the Rival had designed a trap for its hated enemy the
Watcher, and ended up being caught in that same trap along with its
enemy.

3It was in the year that a later age would call 4393 B.C. that
Zadatharion and the other Avatars arrived, after many years of
journeying across Eurasia, at the Pacific Coast, in the lands that had
once been called Goravia.  In 4393, the survivors of the Goravians had
been reduced to an existence only barely above that of the true Stone
Age, but they were beginning to recover, intermixing genetically with
survivors from other regions, and the first hints of a new culture
were appearing in the fertile river valleys, the first tiny embryonic
form of that great Civilization that would someday, in the distant
future, be called ‘China’.

At the coast, the Avatars paused for a time, not quite sure what they
should be doing but knowing they had to be doing it.  They had already
experienced a number of adventures and events during their fifteen-
year journey, and a rest was not entirely unwelcome.  There were
things in the post-apocalyptic world of 4393 B.C. that could threaten
several hundred Avatars gathered in one place, they encamped in a
sheltered place in a fertile small river valley a few miles from the
coast, and waited for they knew not what.

As it happened, they would remain in that region for nearly a year and
a half, before the Watcher’s plan moved into its next step, a time
delay made necessary in part by the lethargy in which the Watcher
drifted.  It was only in the rare lucid moment that the Watcher could
try to manipulate events, and so it was over a year before the
transportation arrived, in the form of several Atlantean ocean-going
sailing vessels, with Atlantean crews.

The Avatars certainly did not expect _this_, even though they had
sensed weeks before hand without any real grasp of how or why that
something was about to happen.  It had been hundreds of years since
the Cataclysm, and now they were all faced with what seemed an
impossibility:  Atlantean ships and sailors.

As it happened, the story was complex.  Here and there around the
world, small communities of Atlanteans had managed to survive the
Cataclysm.  Mostly, this occurred with settlements far from the
coasts, but in one remote part of what would alter be Indonesia, a
community had survived, protected by a combination of luck and
remoteness from the raging elements and paranormal uproar that had
laid waste to a world.  The Watcher, in its brief period of
exceptional lucidity during and immediately after the Cataclysm, had
managed to make contact with them, very briefly and lightly, having
noticed them while surveying the damage, and the Watcher had even
managed to shield their fishing vessels from destruction.  They had
not been a wealthy community, but rather a remote fishing village,
still using sail and psi ships in a world that had largely converted
to steam and Flux power for their oceangoing craft.

In the centuries since, the community had managed to hold together,
joined by other Atlantean survivors, and retaining their psionic gifts
by carefully refusing to outbreed, though this had had its cost in
terms of genetic diversity.  Now, guided by the Watcher, this group
had sailed north, using their knowledge of sailing to build larger
vessels, slow but reliable.  Now the Avatars took sail with these
seamen and their families, and the entire group, numbering nearly two
thousand people all told, Atlanteans (by race) and Avatars, on a fleet
of twenty sailing vessels, took to sea bound for a distant island none
of them had ever visited before, guided only by the imperceptible
mental touch of the Watcher.

None of them were aware of the irony of all this, save for Aradel.
Aradel had journeyed with the Eldest to Atlantis, thousands of years
before, in a situation rather like the one in which she now found
herself.  The Eldest had led a tiny group of Stone Age tribesmen from
northern Europe to Atlantis, and Aradel had been with them, in the
long gone day thousands of years before.  She could remember it, and
if the vessels they now used were far more advanced and comfortable
than the tiny wood and hide boats that had first carried people to
Atlantis, the situation still _felt_ extremely familiar to Aradel.

This journey, though, was far longer than the journey the Eldest had
led his people on, so long before.  In those times they had traveled
along the southern edge of a retreating line of glacial-age pack ice,
now they sailed the open sea on the far side of the planet, in far
superior ships.  Even so, it required a journey of many months to
reach their destination in the vast sweep of the open Pacific.

Food was not a problem, between the fishing skills of the crews and
the psionic power of the Avatars, it was easy enough to survive from
the sea, though their diets were not always ample they were always
sufficient.  Fresh water was more troublesome, pyrokinesis could be
use to purify seawater, but it was a time-consuming and difficult
task, and the supply was limited.  Still, the fleet was never close to
a crisis of either food or water, and only two of the twenty ships
foundered in dangerous weather along the way.  Most of the complement
of each of the lost ships were rescued, and in the end only seven
people failed to arrive at their eventual destination.  For such a
party, with so little knowledge or experience of open-ocean travel
among them, this was quite a remarkable accomplishment.

It was late in May in 4391 B.C. when they finally reached their
destination, the extensively-altered archipelago that we discussed
above.  Now they found several islands within reasonably close
distances of each other, spread out in a line roughly from east to
west, with fertile soil, well-watered and enjoying what proved to be a
tolerable climate.  Though far from paradisiacal, these islands were
certainly and comfortably habitable.

In a later age, these islands would be known as the Cyllellian
Archipelago, or just Cyllellia. [1]

The greatest colonial cities of the Atlanteans had been on the coasts
of the great continents, and had been battered and ripped by monstrous
tsunami effects, as well as by the winds, storms, earthquakes and
paranormal effects of the Cataclysm.  Now the battered remains of
those great cities (the remains that were now swept away by the Eldren
as part of their general ‘cleanup’, that is) were inundated as the
oceans rose up on the continental shelves, creating (more or less) the
coastlines familiar to the modern world.

In most of the world, civilization was completely knocked by to Stone
Age/early metal age levels, but in a few scattered places fragments of
organized civilization did endure.  One such region was the Nile
Valley, another the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates
Rivers.  Another cluster of civilization, of rather different heritage
and origin, endured in the lands around the Yangtze and Huang He
Rivers.

Urban culture began to reemerge, in an embryonic form, in the lands
between the Tigris and the Euphrates (and the lands to the north well)
around as early as 4000 B.C., in the form of tiny walled agricultural
communities, drawing on fragments of knowledge retained from the pre-
Cataclysm global culture.  Most of this knowledge was lost, and what
was retained was mostly irrelevant to the post-apocalyptic world and
rapidly dissolved into a mix of myth and legend.  A few bits and
pieces did become incorporated into the earliest stages of the
Mesopotamian and Nile Valley cultures, however.

One such archaic survival was the use of duodecimal system, another
the sexagesimal system used by the Sumerians.  The former was an
Atlantean holdover, the entire mathematical system of the Atlanteans
was duodecimal.  The Sumerian use of sexagesimal math for astronomy
was an inheritance from Atlantis as well, though of course Sumer did
not yet exist in any recognizable form in 4000 B.C.  The cultures
arising at that time were the proto-cultures that would in the
fullness of time lead to Sumer, however. [1]

The Atlantean heritage in the Nile Valley was stronger than it was in
Mesopotamia.  In the later, the region was more remote from the key
centers of Atlantean civilization prior to the Cataclysm, and the
Atlantean influence was heavily admixed with native pre-Cataclysmic
culture.  In the Nile Valley, on the other hand, matters were quite
otherwise.  The Nile Valley was one of the key centers of
ProtoAthenian culture, along with what would later be Greece and the
Aegean region.  Prior to the Cataclysm, the Nile Valley was heavily
settled, with wealthy, powerful city-states dominating the enormous
river valley.

The ProtoAthenian culture, though partly derived from native sources,
was _much_ more heavily shaped by Atlantean heritage than that
occupying Mesopotamia before the Downfall.  Both the pre-Cataclysmic
population and the cultural heritage of Atlantis were greater in
ProtoAthens, leading to a greater cultural retention of Atlantean
influences (albeit in the form mostly of _heavily_ distorted myth and
legends).

As with the Tigris/Euphrates region, the new proto-urban cultures
emerging in the Nile Valley around circa 4000 B.C. were little more
than tiny agricultural villages, squabbling constantly with each other
and struggling to survive the hazards of TL0/1 life, including crop
failures, disease, climate, and other dangers.  Still, they
represented a vital step forward from the chaos and nomadic existence
of the post-apocalyptic era.  For the first time in centuries,
surpluses of food could be accumulated (albeit small ones), enabling
some people to focus on specialized work, developing techniques and
technologies impossible for nomads.

Around the year 3900 B.C., something else of some importance
occurred:  the Flux began once again to respond to the manipulations
of those scattered few who remembered that it existed and retained
some of the knowledge necessary to make use of it.  These people were
few and far between, most fluxons had died in the Cataclysm, and those
who had survived found their hard-won skills utterly useless with the
power of the Flux ‘interdicted’ by the Eldren.  The skills were for
the most part rapidly forgotten as generation after generation
struggled to survive and prosper in a world laid in ruins.

A scattered handful still retained fragments of the old knowledge,
however, buried in layers of legend and myth, and now they found that
sometimes, occasionally, the ‘old magic’ was working again. [2]

MORE LATER.

[1] The Atlanteans used duodecimal math because the Eldest taught them
that way, and he used it (though he himself did not realize this)
because the _Eldren_ used it themselves.  As an Avatar, he carried
some of that imprint on himself.

In the lands of the Fertile Crescent, a set of proto-cultures emerged
based in part on this fragmentary 'magic'.  The problem for these
individuals was that the old technical knowledge of the Antediluvian
Age was long gone, what remained was scattered bits and pieces of
truthful information and skill, interspersed and inextricably merged
with myth, legend, and nonsense.  Even those individuals able to use
the Flux in some limited, specific way had no real grasp of the 'why'
or the 'wherefore' of what they were doing, operating in much by rote
and a shaky half-grasp of the underlying concepts.

Still, even the tiny fragments of Flux-knowledge they retained could
sometimes be extraordinarily useful, in the dangerous and harsh world
of the third millennium B.C.  Some of the most useful bits and pieces
of surviving knowledge were actually things that the pre-Cataclysmic
time had considered trivial or secondary matters, but the situation
had changed, and basic things were now more useful than sophisticated
applications.  Flux manifestations somehow applicable to combat were
especially valuable in this period.

Many of the first walled villages that would become the ancestral,
embryonic Sumerian culture were founded by some individual who was
able to use the Flux in some limited way, to repel enemies, slay
beasts, or produce some other practical benefit.  The knowledge was
difficult to use properly, in its wildly distorted form, and even well-
meaning attempts to pass the information down often failed.  Still, it
was sufficient to contribute to the restoration of urban society in
both Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley, though it worked differently in
detail in each environment.

The retained Flux knowledge was actually slightly ‘purer’ or more
useful in the Nile Valley, with its purer dose of Atlantean/
ProtoAthenian myth and legend.  Though still mostly myth and nonsense,
the ‘old magic’ worked better for the proto-Egyptians than it did for
the proto-Sumerians, being both somewhat more potent and somewhat more
versatile.  Again, though, passing down the practical side of these
‘supernatural’ skills proved to be a very difficult challenge even in
the Nile Valley region.

In Cyllellia, the return of the Flux was much more significant,
because there the old knowledge was still in a pristine state, both
because of the detailed records brought with the settlers and because
the Avatars who made up the ruling class on the Hidden Archipelago
were immortal.  The two highest ranking of the Avatars of Cyllellia,
Zadatharion and Aradel, were themselves skilled and potent fluxons,
and with the power of the Flux again available they were once more
able to make use of these skills.

Another place where the return of the Flux _should_ have mattered was
to be found in the hidden Refuge in the vast jungle-locked Amazon
Basin.  Unfortunately, matters there had not gone entirely as
Vylyrades might have hoped when he arranged to have the Refuge founded
before the Cataclysm.

The Refuge had been staffed with Atlanteans, powerful both psionically
and in terms of the Flux, but when the Flux failed after the Great
Cataclysm, a major tool of life was taken from these survivors.  There
were less than three hundred people in the small community of the
Refuge, and they seemed to be working almost under a jinx or a curse
from the start.  Within fifty years of the Cataclysm, a local disease
had been able to wipe out nearly a fourth of their population.  An
internal dispute over leadership arose in the third generation of
these isolated, educated and capable people, a dispute that eventually
led to violence and the loss of still more irreplaceable personnel.
The Great Library that Vylyrades had spent so much time assembling and
protecting was even damaged during this fighting.

It should also be noted that for whatever reason, the fertility rate
in the Refuge was never anything like as high as it _could_ have
been.  It was a rare woman of the Refugees who had more than two
children in her lifetime, and the few who did were balanced by those
women who remained entirely childless.  Over the centuries the
population of the Refugees remained close to constant.

Out of necessity, much of the effort of the people in the Refuge, and
their descendents, was dedicated to the simple, unending tasks of
survival.  They had to farm, and fish, and hunt to survive, all of
these are time-consuming and labor-intensive activities. [1]  This
meant that many of the skills that the original staff of the Refuge
had possessed languished, as they and their descendents focused on
practical matters.  The knowledge was not _lost_, it remained recorded
in redundant, carefully protected detail in the Great Library and
lesser collections in the Refuge, but it was studied less and less,
and the precious tomes, after a few generations, were mostly gathering
dust as their guardians focused on the mundane necessities of living.
[2]

By the time other humans resettled the remote regions around the Great
Refuge, five generations had been born and passed on since the
Cataclysm isolated the place.  The long lifespans of the founding
generation shrank rapidly among their descendents, both because of the
loss of the Flux power that had been one reason for the long lifespans
before the Cataclysm, and because even the psionic power the community
still retained required a great deal of time and discipline and study
to be used to full effect.  They did still live much longer and better
than the new settlers spreading into the region around them, but
nothing close to what their ancestors a few generations before had
been able to achieve.

Human nature, for the most part, is a historical constant.  As
ordinary, non-psionic, TL0 humans spread into the region, they
outnumbered the Refuge community enormously, and in many ways their
practical day-to-day knowledge of living in the region with minimal
resources was better than that of the Refugees.  Their numbers and
connections to kin and fellows in other parts of the basin gave them
resources the people of the Refuge, with their low fertility rate and

but the Refuge had managed to retain some TL2 and TL3 technology and
had some access to some TL4 equipment, _plus_ still-considerable
psionic abilities.  In any one-on-one confrontation, the Refugees
would easily overcome the new people.

What _could_ have occurred was an exchange of resources, knowledge,
the use of trade and commerce to advance the interests of both
groups.  The knowledge and skills of the Refugees and the numbers and
resources of the new settlers could have been combined to make both
wealthier, healthier, and more powerful and secure.  Trade, commerce,
and knowledge could have spread along the river routes of the region,
bringing peace and prosperity as they did.

What actually did happen was that the interaction of the two groups
was marked by violence and mutual hostility almost from the first
moment of contact.

MORE LATER.

[1] Fishing for pleasure is not necessarily labor-intensive.  Fishing
as a regular source of necessary food, on the other hand, is work.

Within fifty years of contact, the Refugees had solved their labor
shortage by the traditional means: they earned their bread by the
sweat of another person's brow, at weapon-point.  The Refugees worked
their farms with slave labor taken from the new incomers, who were
treated with a sort of even-handed disdain.  The Refugees looked on
the newcomers as intellectual, social, genetic, and moral inferiors,
and the newcomers looked on the Refugees as elitists, cruel, arrogant,
and rapacious (after they realized that the Refugees were merely
mortals, not spirits of some kind, that is).  Both sides preyed on the
other, it would be impossible to meaningfully say which side 'started
it', the hostility and disdain were mutual.

The Refugees did not treat their slaves cruelly...exactly.  That is,
they were not intentionally malicious or brutal (as a group,
exceptions always exist), but they were also harsh and even-handedly
strict, their slaves were expected to be at work when they were not
asleep, and if they were fed sufficiently to work well, they were
otherwise treated as little better than smart animals by their
captors.  The ideals and moral standards of the Refugees had
degenerated over time.

The newcomers were not, as a whole, morally much if any better.  They
might have had a reasonable chance of overwhelming the Refugees if
they had attacked as a common force, but the newcomers, though
speaking similar tongues and closely related, were divided into
warring tribes, clans and families and found it difficult to combine
to accomplish anything.  Their cultures were often brutal, and
captured Refugees could expect a painful and slow death in most cases.

For over two hundred years, this condition continued, but the Refugees
were in an untenable long-term position, even if they were too far
gone in decline from their ancestral knowledge to realize it.  The
population of the newcomers continued to grow, reinforced both by new
arrivals and a high fertility rate, the population of the Refugees not
only stayed constant, but was admixed with new blood from among the
slave population.

This was not, _in itself_, necessarily a bad thing, it certainly
brought some hybrid vigor, but it also ‘diluted’ the psionic
inheritance of the Refugees that was part of the basis of their
power.  Further, the fertility rate among the Refugees remained low,
barely at replacement at that best of times.  As slave labor reduced
to connection between the Refugees and the necessities of daily work,
instead of using the time to study or master the old knowledge still
theoretically available in the Great Library, or to explore the
changed world around them, or much of anything creative or useful,
instead the Refugees became a self-coddled petty aristocracy, laziness
being rampant among them with a few generations of the start of the
slave labor system.

The end was almost anticlimactic.  It started with a bought of
disease, as a strain of influenza mutated and swept through both the
newcomers (who by then had been present for centuries) and the
Refugees.  The newcomers had a high death rate, but proved more
resistant than the Refugees with their tiny population and limited
genetic diversity.  This strain of the virus proved to be particularly
nasty, killing nearly a fourth of the Refugees over the course of
three months.

They might have recovered from that, but in the following wet season
the rains came with unusual strength, and floods swept through much of
the Amazon Basin.  The river on which the Refuge sat was merely a
tributary of a tributary of the Amazon proper, but it too was swept by
heavy floods, and the Refuge was partly flooded when their poorly-
maintained levee systems gave way, permitting the inundation of both
the planted fields and part of the central encampment.  Many of the
inhabitants were killed when the levee failure produced this sudden
flood.

The destruction of much of the crops that year left the Refugees short
of food throughout the following year, surrounded by hostiles, their
clean water supplies tainted, and the vulnerability did not go
unnoticed.  The attack finally came some months after the flood, when
several of the local tribes, now grown to considerable numbers,
_finally_ managed to put aside their differences and unite behind one
charismatic and capable leader who organized the attack on their hated
common enemy.

The attackers achieved tactical surprise, the Refugees had a good idea
than an attack was coming, but when it came it came from a direction
and at a time they had least expected.  Even so, the Refugees made a
solid accounting of themselves in the defense, it was far bloodier
than the attackers had hoped.  The kill ratio of the battle was at
least eleven-to-one in favor of the defenders.

Unfortunately for the defenders, they were outnumbered closer to
twenty-to-one, and the attackers were more than slightly fanatical in
their motivating hatred.  When it was over, the Refugees were dead,
and the encampment wrecked, or mostly so.  Some particularly well-made
areas survived, and one of the last surviving defenders managed to
trip a catch that lowered heavy (twenty tons or more) stone blocks
into place sealing off the entrances to the Great Library.

This did not matter much to the attackers, who had little interest in
the Library or the other contents of the encampment.  They slaughtered
the survivors, burned much of the wooden portion of the community to
the ground, wrecked what they could of the stone buildings and
structures, and abandoned the site and the immediate surrounding
region, which in after generations became more-or-less of a taboo
site.

At first the site was still easily accessible, because of the river
that ran directly through it.  As time passed, however, the river
changed its course, as rivers are known to do, and the original
channel around which the Refuge was constructed became a stagnant side-
stream, and the entire site was overgrown by the jungle to the point
that an unaware human might walk no more than twenty meters outside
the site and be totally unaware that the ruins were there.

Within the ruins, the Great Library remained hidden, half-flooded,
sealed off, a treasure-trove of ancient knowledge.  Lesser libraries
and collections also endured within the ruins, untouched and
forgotten.  As time passed, and the memory of the hated Refugees faded
into myths and legends of supernatural horrors and evil spirits, the
taboo over approached that site strengthened.  When the Flux returned
in 3900 B.C. (or thereabouts), the dread of the site was increased
because the Flux manifestations, emplaced by Vylyrades and his fellows
centuries before, regained their former potency, adding to the
supernatural dread associated with the entire area.

Thus it was that the Great Refuge passed into obscurity, where it
would remain until the 19th Century A.D.