Chronicles From The Future: The amazing story of Paul Amadeus Dienach

At the junction of Eliki the all the passengers exchanged the vigioza for several small-wheeled Cives mintels that had been waiting for us there. All four of us got into one of them and continued our journey. After exiting Eliki, the first thing I saw was around a hundred priestesses of the Rosernes Dal awaiting the arrival of the vigiozas

so they could continue, in turn, their own journey. I remember having come across a few of them in Markfor too, but never so many of them together. They didn’t look like travellers. The small, soft handbags they were carrying were the only thing that gave them away. Quite a few of them were encircled by children—two or three around each. I counted about a hundred and fifty of them, but they must have been even more! Was it considered as some kind of an “honorary escort” for priestesses or had they been entrusted with the children’s care? You couldn’t tell. They stood there motionless in contemplation and the obedient children stood quietly by their side.

At the flower gardens of the junction of Eliki I saw for the first time what is probably the most absurd luxury of these times, something that I had not seen in any of the major cities so far—not in Markfor, not in Blomsterfor, not in Anolia, not even in Norfor: enormous artificial baskets with a diameter of 15-20 meters decorated with flowers and plants hung from everywhere, magnificent artworks of some virtuoso florist-painter- and wonderful tableaus with themes from the “Advent of the 200” and the creation of the Valley of Roses.

The flowers and plants here are not geometrically or lace-shaped like in Markfor. Here what prevails are the myriad, totally natural looking shades of green, from the light, silvery olive green to the black-green of the fir trees, in forms and shapes exquisitely crafted and daily tended to by specially assigned “florist-supervisors”, so that the work of the “teacher” does not wilt or get damaged in the slightest. From afar they look like gobelin tapestries laid on the ground as if to welcome the travellers. Of course, no one touches them.

In the afternoon we were on the road again. It had become a lot more obvious now from the surrounding landscapes that we were approaching the Valley. Big temples and institutes spanning hundreds of meters and all sorts of kierketaarns

—perfectly round or ellipsoid little temples with snow-white, circular colonnades—had now taken the place of the giant blockhouses on both sides of the road and the shades of pastel colours had given way to a soft rose colour light.

The sky here is completely free of those dense, dark flocks of enormous flying vehicles and the thousands of platforms and terraces of the linsens here are scattered among parks and flower-gardens instead of the giant airports of northern regions.

Every now and then, you could see up on the hill the manor houses of the Lorffes, the leading representatives of modern spirit—still locked for this season—which, however, belong to the Rosernes Dal and not personally to them, and which later will be passed on to their spiritual successors, as Stefan informed me. Beside them you could see the hermitages of the Ilectors

, deserted red granite monasteries built with severe contours, the personal silent retreats of the Emeriti.

What mesmerises the people of today even more than the beauty of nature, even more than the magnificence of the environment, are the toponyms and the childhood memories they evoke.

Silvia and Hilda had come to the Valley on Christmas Eve many years ago and Stefan had visited the great spiritual centre a few times a while after them, but all of them already knew the history of every inch of this land from when they were still at school.

If you take a glance behind the poplars that line the creek, behind the light pink wall of the monastery of the Ilectors

in Delfia, you can distinguish the complex of the one-floor communal facilities of the hermits of Naade. Astrucci and Lain had told me about them in Markfor: four hundred years ago their predecessors were the original “founding fathers” of the Valley, the earliest scholars, interpreters and editors of the oldest texts of the Aidersian tradition. They still call them by the Greek word “eremites”, which means hermit.

SILEA, THEIR ARTIFICIAL MOTHER RIVER

While the hazy sun was slowly setting, Stefan, who up to that point had been calm as always, suddenly grabbed my armed to show me a large river that had popped out from the West in the far in the background. “Look! Look!” he cried and simultaneously Silvia and Hilda started screaming in excitement “It’s Silea! Silea!”