The old ones, ghosts now, had grand and glorious machines. They inhabited glittering cities of light. They loved to fly (seemingly so dangerous to us). They could fly across oceans. Their sailing vessels filled the skies. They mapped the stars and sent men into space, but they went mad and destroyed themselves. Faint traces of the old world can still be seen in our world, in ruins and refuse not yet been reclaimed by nature. We do not know what lies beyond our shores. Our seafaring vessels are not capable of traversing the globe. Over many generations our people have engaged in battles but nothing like the great wars of the past. We live a peaceful existence. We feel blessed. We share a common language with the old world, with our ancestors; even so, many of their words seem foreign to us and are difficult to decipher. The old ones were capable of great magic. They were able to record and transmit images of themselves across great distances. This art has now been lost. We do have transcripts of these talking pictures along with faded photographs, ragged books and other deteriorating volumes archived in makeshift libraries. Sadly, the largest of these libraries recently burned. This is why we have decided to compile and distill from the existing archives a few stories that describe those final days. We are thinking of future generations, that there will be a record not just of sacred texts (stories of sky gods and virgin births), of poets and philosophers and of visionaries and prophets but we wish to produce (using the archives and literary techniques discovered in the books of the old ones) a glimpse into this ancient civilization before death and the whirlwind overtook them.