I am Erodotus, the Mad Historian. No ears will any longer take in the
warnings I give. Which are the dreams, my nights or my days? The nights are haunted by visions of civilisations long ruined, where
men spoke tongues understood by none today, save one. In the day I
struggle so to find an audience for my words, I might as well be
speaking an incomprehensible tongue. They are all asleep, in the day
as in the night, delving into the same pasts I see, addicted to those
pasts as to those potions they take to prolong their dreams. There
are those who dwell in the past to hide from the present, and those
who search unfathomable pasts for answers, both equally mad. Yet the healers think me mad! Would that I had
known it would come to this.
But first...
Legend has it that the peoples of New Amazon were visited by two
plagues which shaped their present race, and are doomed to be
scourged by another that will prove their end. The first of these was
a pox which took all their menfolk, yet left the women untouched bar
their grief. Their treasuries possessed stores of seed with which to
sire new young; but any boys born fell ill with the same pox and did
not last long. But the women knew not despair, for their cities were
high in Science. They attempted to find cures for that dread disease,
but all manner of elixir, herbal or alchemical, proved futile. The
women then turned their efforts to finding a way to bear children
without men, at which task they succeeded by a method (involving two
women) still used in the present day.
