Most parents from the Old Country tell their children that they were a gift from the Angels. My mother, however, had always told me the same story from the time I was an infant. She would say, "Ruth, you were a special child, born of the Earth from a single soup bean." I never truly believed a word of that, but I always knew Mother as the sort of cheery, but foolish, old woman who would.

The Old Country was a stretch of valley from the base of the Northern Mountains to the barren Wasteland that lay into the icy water of the Channel. The air was always cold there, and the tree-barren earth was as flat as the oil paved streets. The fields outside of most towns could stretch for miles in any given direction, but they would never fall away into the Wasteland, which had long ago been cursed by the sea. Or so they say.

The majority of the people here were initially farmers, or sometimes a passing merchant from some rich city-state in the South who decided to open up shop. I always dreamed of going to the South. Then again, most children did. The children of Ren, I being no exception, would flock to the city center to listen to the old men and ladies tell tales of the silver land that they had abandoned long before. There were tales of heroes and great kings who had made their riches through conquest and lavish festivals with cherries and lime, the sort of exotic things no one born in Ren had ever tasted. We would listen for hours, the girls in their coarse grey dresses and the boys in their overalls, and ignore the cold as long as there was a flax golden tale to spin.

However, before the Southerners dared to explore the distant Old Country, the peasant people grew potatoes or carrots or those wretched beans that Mother thought gave birth to little children out of the stony soil which had previously never bore a single blade of grass. The work was hard and the conditions were poor, but soon the land gave way to a hardy, prosperous community. The city of Ren was the first to rise out of the Old Country and that was where I was born, many years ago. It really became a rather lovely place of fountains and shimmering ponds of human design, but I guess I had never been enchanted enough to stay.

Even as the country grew, the people of our community still truly loved the Angels. They were said to be the spirits that played with the children in the streets and kept the old folks company before they entered the Afterlife. Many of the elders claimed that it was the Angels, themselves, who has blessed the land with the abundant harvests each year, despite the terrible growing conditions. They always said we were chosen people, and now that I've had my share of years, I'm inclined to agree.

And this is where my story beings: in a strange blessed country with dreams of a silver city and a tale of an infant soup bean.