I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.. I don’t know what this means. I think I’m coming out of it. I’ve been in a blackness, interrupted occasionally by the voices of gods and visions of worlds I do not know. One of the voices said it was our past.

“You took the Dreaming drink three days ago,” a voice tells me. “It’s time to come home.”

I’m scared. I don’t want to go back. The world I’ve seen was horrific. But something tells me this is the way things used to be. The way things still should be. It was clustered with so many people, how could they have been able to survive in such tight quarters? I saw the large buildings, shiny, with no vines or trees growing on them from which to climb. A blue sky?

Mara Kar stands over me. Her face is blurry, but I know it’s her. She says I need to eat. Her voice echoes throughout my body, bouncing off my bones and around in my skull. I want to tell her that I love her, but I cannot speak.

I have a bitter taste in my mouth. My mind clears a bit. I realize it’s the Sikanda root. It’s the only way to bring a shaman back from the petite morte. Am I a shaman now? I remember the trial by fire. I remember the petite morte. I have taken the Sikanda root, so I must have entered cloud-koma.

Mara Kar’s face becomes clearer. She is smiling. She tells me I shouldn’t move. I feel very weak. I’m not sure I could move. The men of my tribe, the Tribe of the Star, gather around me and pick me up. I am carried from the fire circle, where I took the Dreaming drink, to my house.

I can smell the tin and plastek that mark my home. It is unique among our village, as I salvaged the rare materials during my Test of Bravery. My windows are real glas. Taking these things from the land of Nyc was difficult and almost cost me my life.

Ahh.. My bed. It is soft and comforting. I am told to rest, but sleep comes hard. My body fights. It is afraid it will enter the cloud-koma again. When sleep finally comes, it is broken by dreams of remembered visions, voices of foreign gods asking for their chance to rule again.

***

“What did you see, Malig-Jon?” Mara Kar asks me as I awaken.

“I saw many things. I saw the future of our tribe. I saw the past of our tribe, our stories come true. I saw the land of the gods, magnificent and terrifying. I saw you, and our first daughter. She had your eyes. You told me her name.”

“What will her name be Malig-Jon?” Mara Kar's voice was trembling with expectation.

“Chrysler.”

This story is set in a distant, post-apocalyptic future. The people of the area in and around present-day New York City(now called Nyc, pronounce 'Nik') have assembled into tribes of 50-100. Upon reaching the age of adulthood(17), the men are put through trials to determine their jobs within the tribe. The main character, Malig-Jon, has just passed the final test to become a Hunter-Shaman. His betrothed, Mara Kar, was trained as a healer after her Test of Womanhood, a year earlier at the age of 16. The average lifespan of a tribal is 35 years.

Very few people are able to read, thus an oral history is the only real record of what caused the cataclysm that ravaged the Earth into its current state. Those of the Shaman Path hold and pass on this history, as well as create it from the visions they see when taking the hallucinogenic Dreaming Drink. This tea places the shaman into a disassociated coma-like state that can last anywhere from minutes to days.

Changes in spelling and pronunciation are intentional, and are meant to signify the ill-informed evolution of the English language.