Almost Earth

From the briefest of glances, Almost Earth is exactly like your own. Time is as it is where you are, and you will soon get the sense that if you were to look for your best friend, or your childhood home, you would find it here, the same as you remember it. "Almost Earth," you think, "Is just the same as Earth." And you would be correct. Well, almost correct.   The truth is, Almost Earth, my Earth, is exactly the same as yours, except for the addition of one figure, very long ago, who introduced two things to my world. The first, magic. Or rather, the increased flexibility of my universe compared to yours. Many people have, or are connected to, or can summon magic, whether they be human-apparent or creature-it-seems. Second, which is in truth a variation of the first, is the absence of the definite. Just as the laws of my universe are flexible, so are the truths and facts of my world. Nothing is as it seems, really, but who can really say?   But beyond that, we of Almost Earth are painfully, blindingly normal. We exist to survive, against things we both believe and don't believe in, for ideals we will inevitably question. When we look at your world, you appear just as strange as we do to you. The few of us who remember Before, who know about the fact that we change and shift like the wind, who can look past our lives into yours, we listen. We dream. We love and we hate and we explore, by the universe do we explore. We watch, we listen, we wait, as our creator and our creator's creations influence our world, our lives, and our minds. Ours is a world of cracked walls, always a moment away from crumbling, still holding strong. I wonder, who will be the one to push us past the line?