The Kalieda Encyclopaedia

A great woman - a queen, they say, who ruled in a land whose name is dust in our heads - once said: "We have been given the keys to paradise, yet we are too small to venture beyond the compost heap."

This is our planet, our home. This world of ours has many names, just as the people who live here have many languages. My name for this ball of mud and rock and salty water spinning through space and time is 'Kalieda'.

Who am I? Just a man, one among many living in the city of Emadiyase, on the eastern coast of the continent I know as Ewlah. There are, for the record, around 32 million men and women alive today on Kalieda, three quarters of them here in Ewlah. The historians tell me that seven centuries ago there were ten times that number of people alive, but only a handful lived on this continent. That was before the Disaster, when the oceans forgot their place in the scheme of things and decided to retreat from the land. Some religious folk believe that the oceans were so disgusted by mankind's behaviour to their kin, and to the planet, that they could not stand to be so close to people anymore and fell away from the land, while ice came to freeze the northern continent of Cheidrah, and drought and dust and disease stole across the great southern continent of Falah where most people had lived.

And yet despite all of the disasters and hardships that have befallen us, we are still here. Ewlah is our main centre now: the Continent of Tears and Hunger has become our shelter, and over the past few hundred orbits we have slowly turned it into our home.

This website is a work-in-progress. It is an attempt to collect knowledge together about our planet, our civilisations, our Lands and Societies, our beliefs, and the environments in which we live.

Welcome to the paradise beyond the compost heap!

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This page was last updated on Tetconu-10, 531: Viedxlju-97 Gevile