Eirsace

The bluster of an autumn come early. A dog yips, running circles around a much-prodded firepit refusing to cooperate, as it is chased by three youngsters tripping over each other in giggling haste. Villagers gather for the weekly summit, faces protected by plastic ponchos and the zippers of home-sewn rain-garments, discussing all manner of things: whose pots had gone missing and by whom they had been found; who this week was offering their time and cookery up for the common good; whose coat was holding up the best in this weather, and whether they would teach a textiles class for the teenagers; the mud, about which none were happy, stopping many a pair of legs which would but for the rain be well on its way by this time yesterday.

The self-propagating philosophy of an independent people cannot survive for long once its people have dried up. In a world where all are nomads, none remain so; the meaning of individuality is lost when reliance on others is made either necessary or impossible with no in-between.

The many and multicoloured communities of Eirsace disperse all at once, and from that state of entropy, they never manage to recover. Eirsasi mythology, too, changes to survive, evolving like some strained organism of its own kind. Desperate storytellers – those few who remain – tell their oral histories in shorter form each time, details substituted for speed, words falling over each other in a panic in case they are someone's last. Some make it into writing, some are carved, some remembered. Some are not.

There is no longer any such as place as Eirsace. Perhaps, it is argued by a particularly bold ring of contemporary scholars, there never was. Instead, Eirsace was always best understood as a general term for a collection of communities. Communication between them, then, must logically have been little; this would have been especially true for those who left old homes for new ones upon maturation, never to return. This would of course have made individuals terribly vulnerable to the tides of change. It is really no wonder that the population became so sparse as it did, and Eirsasi heritage so rare nowadays. The Eirs all spoke different dialects, after all, and translation of what little remains of their stories is nigh impossible. It was a wonder any one of them ever understood their neighbours at all.

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