In the beginning, there was no such thing as heaven or hell.
All that there was then, was earth.
I speak of a land far before time – far before the concept of
time. When men and gods coexisted – lived and died and fought and loved. People
thought of time in breaths and moonrises and winters; and if they missed one – say
a breath or a moonrise or a winter – time simply ceased to exist. But, for the
sake of chroniclers and people who shall doubt my story, I shall state that we
were of twelve thousand winters before the coming of that messiah many call Yesus.
It is unclear how everything our world as we saw it came to
be. There were only stories and songs and poems passed down from generation to
generation; hymns sung at festivals or lullabies that put children to sleep.
It was said that God created man. I shall not dwell on this
story for I do not know how or why or when and I will not submit myself to
conjecture. All that I know is that once God created man – whichever God this
was – He could no longer bear his creation. So He created a new race to destroy
humankind. Having set this race upon men, God retreated to the mountains, far
away from his creations. Men came to know this race by many names. In our
kingdom, we called them demons.
My name is Sanjaay and I shall tell you the story of how our
world came to be. There are raconteurs and mischief-mongers in our ranks and I
have no doubt they shall pervert the truth with their self serving versions.
The events of history – this history of our land– shall thus inevitably have
many versions, doubtless. I was there with General Ramm, I fought by his side
and at the very end when I left his service, and he confided in me everything –
even his deepest darkest secrets. I began to write this book, this memoir of
the great man that once was, when my body was no longer fit for soldiering but
my mind was still robust. I travelled far and wide. I met gods and demons
alike; sons and wives of men long gone – just so the world may know full well
the truth about our times.
And so it was that thousands of winters ago, that earth as we
knew it – as I knew it – came to be, with man and God at absolute odds.
In my time, we called our land ‘Hind’.
A land of gods and men and everything in between.
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