The bone-white eye of a low-slung moon stared the Captain in the face. He held the flickering torch close. Maddy and Veronica leaned in, the firefly-light dancing in their eyes. He began:
It was a land of dragons and redwoods, of towering ferns and boulder-sized diamonds. The People of Wood filled the cosmos. Their starships filled the universe, and they landed right here in the Cloud Forest.
They roamed the forests for thousands of years with no concept of “private property” or even of “my.” They lived as naked as they were born, and as naked as they would die. Everything and nothing was theirs.
They believed in the dream force: the reality that lies behind all things, a world they could touch only in their dreams. They believed everything you see—the entire observable universe—was a mere shadow of a dream.
They believed there were those among them—the Dreamers—who dreamt, even while awake. They believed space and time bent to these Dreamers, that the whole universe existed simply to make their dreams come true, that every Dreamer dreamt a different part of the same beautiful dream.
They lived the way their grandfather’s grandfathers lived, and they lived that way for thousands of years. No people anywhere lived in one place longer than the People of Wood lived here.