The Rivening

Dahria 102

The following day, Connie kept watch from her kitchen window for the gate to swing open on the backyard fence. To help pass the time, she positioned a stool near the window so she could sit and read while waiting for the signal that Arden was situated.

Finally, mid-morning, the gate opened. Arden seemed to look a little better, more relaxed. He had a broad smile. When he saw Connie, his eyes welled, and he wiped at the tears. "Sorry," he said.

And then her tears fell.

"We have to stop meeting like this," she blubbered.

He laughed, a generous, warm laugh as they continued wiping their eyes. "Are you a little less angry with me today?"

"A little less. You might even be growing on me. Are you feeling better?" Connie was trying, not very successfully, to find her everyday tone.

"Yes, I am. Quite a bit. Thank you. I should be back to normal in a few more days. I've asked them to stay inside while we talk," he gestured with his head toward the house. "Eneko will come out and get me in a little while. They're being overly protective, but I'll let them do that for now. Pria told me she started to tell you about Dahria. I'm guessing you're finding the idea of Dahria somewhat preposterous."

"That would be putting it mildly. But I'll try to suspend my disbelief, at least for a while, and hear you out. It's actually quite fascinating, even if it is a fairy tale."

"I thought that today, I'd let you start. If there are any questions you want me to answer, I could start there rather than rambling on. I have a reputation of being long-winded at times," he grinned.

"Pria talked about the Rivening, she called it, when Dahria was formed. And said it happened around the time when the size of human settlements started accelerating, and all that brought with it in some places. That's about where we stopped. What does that have to do with Dahria? I hear you're the big expert."

"First, to be precise, Earthside and Dahria were formed at the same time. It was a splitting of the life that began on our planet billions of years ago. It was a dividing, not a creation of one or the other."

Connie shook her head, "So plants, animals, people, everything was duplicated?"

"Yes, and all that is inanimate as well."

"Mountains? Oceans?"

"Yes, of course. I know. Hard to grasp."

"So Dahria looks the same?"

"Yes. The big pieces do like oceans, mountains, canyons, lakes, rivers are largely the same, though we haven't controlled the rivers as much as you have. Much less farmland, and Dahria has no large, dense urban settlements, no tall buildings. We estimate that we have maybe 1/100th of the population of Earthside."

"What?!? Really? Why is that?"

"After the Rivening, the two realms evolved differently. Tradition has it that Dahria became a haven for enslaved people fleeing from Earthside who wanted lives without warfare or overlord hierarchies. Over time, their ways became the dominant Dahrian culture. Some of our most popular myths involve peace-loving Dahrians kidnapping and dragging any warmongers through a passage and dumping them one at a time on Earthside. How much that happened, I don't know. But a kind of ethos formed around the idea..."

Connie broke in, and spoke sharply, "But wait, wait. I still don't get it. One, one hundredth of our population!?! What's that? Like 80 million people in total around the world? What do you do? Prevent women from having babies?"

Arden smiled, "No, Connie. If anything, it's been the opposite. About 100 years ago, our global council realized populations were starting to shrink. Now we keep a closer track so that doesn't happen. And most of the domains seem to have found a good equilibrium."