In the beginning, there was a strand. Unmapped, unnumbered, unsealed — a tiny piece of a Pebes’dent, carrying something unspoken — not code, not form, but a hitherto unknown kind of memory that carried the desire to be.

Allegedly, it came from a last still-human sequence — preserved in a handful of obscure, nearly inaccessible vaults and dated just hours before the Fall, the fateful event that, in only a few centuries, led to the near-extinction of what was once called humanity — the most numerous and near-indefinitely powerful race. (Others — those not of the Pebes — prefer calling that event the Rise.)

Nobody knows exactly what happened. Some historians claim the degradation of the human genome was not natural, but secretly encoded by certain Mentes — a fail-safe option for a worst-case scenario, never meant to be triggered.

It was.

The song I share below is my reconstruction of a long-lost epic, of which only a small fragment was preserved — believed to be written by a man who once, ages ago, voyaged to the Southern Lands of the Old Planet, still inhabited by the Pebes at the time. There, it is said, he found the mythic strand. He brought it back. Then vanished — somewhere into the nowhere of the Old Planet.

Here is the preserved part believed to be authentic:

listen—if that road still lives
in these very lines,
alive we are, held in something true—
and passing through.
Still in the memory are we.
Still in the memory we are.