The Levanter, the true Levanter, were a secretive and mostly forgotten people whose ancestry traced back over eight thousand years. Legend held that they arose in the Middle East, south of the Taurus Mountains, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea on the west, and by the northern Arabian Desert and Upper Mesopotamia to the east.

"And the truth is not far off the mark," Avarsa laughed to herself, patting the ground beside her.

Avarsa paused in her thoughts to examine the stars overhead, each one bright and sharp, as the lack of air pollutants above this unusually high mountain plateau made for excellent viewing. Deciphering no hidden messages as to her people's immediate future, she looked back down.

Sitting on Avarsa' s lap was the ancient Tome of Levanter, the journal of her people. Their history. The binding and cover had long since disintegrated across the vastness and depth of time, and the entire first half of this two foot thick volume was now preserved against the ravages of moisture and light. Each page of parchment had been coated with a quick-drying dense flexible acrylic whose formula had only recently been sold for two hundred millions dollars to a Japanese textile company.

Avarsa turned the pages back to the very beginning and deciphered the maddening mix of runes, hieroglyphs, and pre-Hittite scratchings with little to no effort. These earliest of accounts had always held the greatest mystery for her people, for they were written in the third person, and could not be identified by author and leader, as the vast majority of later writings could.

Avarsa skimmed these ancient tales of skirmish and ongoing warfare. For at least three hundred years the great host of The Levanter knew neither rest nor peace. They were a warrior race from birth to death. But fortune did not favor them, as thousands upon thousands died in combat, far more quickly than could be replenished in even this once lush fertile land. And upon the end of the most destructive and terrible of these long forgotten wars, The Levanter, the few thousand men, women, and children still alive, became a Nomadic people, homeless, and cursed to travel the earth for more than eight millennia.

"And what was our curse?" Avarsa mused while glancing back at the stars. Why, the most frightening and irrational of all. An entire race's commitment and blood sworn oath to nonviolence. And Avarsa's eyes stabbed downward to the fiftieth page of the tome, reading those words which had forever guided the heart and soul of her people.

"Our people are dying," the ancient anonymous author had written. "Levanter seed springs no longer plentiful. Our pride and bloodlust has become our downfall. And so we who lead, now pledge our very spirit, the manna of Levanter, that which moves in all of us. To the depths of memory, bloodlust has guided our way. Hatred and war have long been our friend...but no longer. We, the dying elders of a dying people place this geas upon all our offspring. The Levanter will never follow the path of bloodshed. The Levanter will make peace with all neighbors. The Levanter, even upon threat of death, will justify no violence with self-preservation. So we pledge. For now and all eternity, until the very sun burns out in the sky, and all living things crumble to the dust from which we have all sprung."

Avarsa rubbed her eyes and studied the distant horizon. In a matter of hours the sun would rise and her people would see what mankind had wrought. Pondering the approaching cataclysm, she thought on the irony of her existence, and that of her people. So many years, so many countries (many which no longer even existed), and yet some how, some way, by some miracle, they had managed to keep their cultural heritage intact.

"Though its polytheistic multi-ethic blending would confuse even the hardiest anthropologist," Avarsa smiled.

Opening the tome to the 100th page, Avarsa read the words of the tenth great Leader of her people, Ommura the Wise, a woman who had lived to the age of 105, and whose observations on the ways and mind of mankind still held sway among the leadership of The Levanter.

"And so for five hundred years," Ommura had written, "The Levanter have pursued it's quest to find a resting place, a utopia, a home where we could live and truly embrace our pacifist ideal...but ever have we been disappointed. For five centuries our horde has grown, blossoming far beyond the numbers we had reached in our prime when we raised numerous flocks on distant lands. And during the last three hundred years, four times has internecine squabbling arose, and contentious factions birthed, and the many inevitable splits began."

Avarsa's hand trembled as it turned the page.

"And four times, leaders of those generations arose, renouncing our people's oath of nonviolence, slaughtering great numbers of those who would not join them, until in their horrific slaughter they outraged their own followers, who slew them, and were themselves expunged, thrown out, banned for all time from the fellowship of The Levanter. And so with each shame we have been forced to move to new lands, to leave behind the taint of that which we had spawned, until the present time, where now all one hundred thousand of us live within these snow covered valleys, five decades since any have witnessed or partaken in violence, and I wonder if we have finally found our home..."

And a tear came to Avarsa's eye, for she had long ago memorized these words, and knew that shortly after writing this particular passage, Ommur would be slain by an overwhelming barbarian cavalry who would enslave her people for the next six hundred years.

Wiping her eyes Avarsa skipped ahead to that time when twenty thousand of her people engineered their escape from the Asian sub-continent, crossing fierce mountain ranges and settling, for a time at least, among the valleys of what would later become known as Transylvania. The leader of her people at this time was none other than Barrhuma, a long-lived woman whose writings were as dispassionate as they were detailed.

"And as The Levanter traveled across one continent, then another, so they absorbed and interbred with many peoples of these native lands, and so they begot sub-tribes, smaller hosts who forsake their ultimate and holiest of traits, that one not commit violence for any reason whatsoever. And thus The Levanter, forgotten mere centuries after their passing, gave birth to many nomadic peoples, their imperfect children..."

And Avarsa looked to the sky once more, imagining the hosts of those cast off from The Levanter, living souls who in the tens of thousands would eventually become the Ababdeh, the Bakhtiari of Iran, the Bedouin, the Kuchis, the Finns, the Tuaregs, the Somalis, the Nenetses, the Moken, the Mrazig of Tunisia, the Eurasian Avars, the Hephthalites, the Turks, the Khazars, the Magyars, the Moors, the Mongols, the Wu Hu, the reindeer-herding Sami, and so many forgotten others who inevitably perished, the victims of genocide, the most horrific answer to so many ancient conflicts.

Avarsa skipped ahead many hundreds of years in the journal, and settled upon the writings of Leeanoua The Chaste. A critical woman who addressed many of those issues which had plagued The Levanter's greatest minds even unto the present. The date was 400 B.C.

"And in this great intermingling of peoples, so were the bloodlines of many nations mixed among The Levanter, so much so that within a few thousand years our people no longer resemble our original forebears, and we are labeled a mongrel race, and shunned by many wherever we travel..."

A clanking bell caught Avarsa's attention. Some goats were waking up and going about their business. The sun would rise soon. So strange how a people hung on to their affectations. They had stored decades' worth of foodstuffs, yet one enterprising family foresaw the need for fresh milk and cheese, even if they had no clue how to actually produce it. Yes. Her people were survivors.

Avarsa, perhaps feeling the approaching fringes of Fate's all powerful fingers, skipped ahead another fifty pages. Her eyes fell upon the writings of Borvalin, one of the very few male leaders of The Levanter. Wise and brave and fearless he was... but soon seduced by the sons and daughters of Judea. Borvalin eventually left The Levanter, changing his name to Hillel, and sharing much of his wisdom and teachings with his fatherless grandson, Yeshua of Nazareth, who would himself father one of the most influential of modern religious movements.

Avarsa paused from her reading and glanced up one last time at the stars. They were fading as the sky turned grey with the rising sun. By what miracle had her people survived this modern age she pondered. For survive they had, well into mankind's recorded history. And as humanity spread across the globe, and industry grew and the sciences were spawned, so The Levanter had somehow continued on, far beyond the birth and death of Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed. And so these newer religions caused even greater schisms, and The Levanter gave birth to the Roma, the Kalderash, the Gitano, the Manush, the Romnichal, the Saami, and most recently the Gaelic Travelers.

The horizon grew red as Avarsa skipped ahead toward the rear of the Tome. To the entries of one of her People's most famous leaders. A man who held his true heritage secret, while masquerading as a child of another tribe. A great leader who showed Levanter ideals to the larger world, and who eventually died at the hands of those who would not embrace his ways. Avarsa read aloud one of Mahatma Gandhi's last passages in the tome.

"A people's greatness is measured not by the rule of law, or might, or fierce self-survival, but by that of their own innate heroism, the strength of their beliefs, and the bravery of their convictions..."

And so Avarsa shed another tear, for the truth of her people shined most brightly in Gandhi's words. For they showed the real nature of Levanter belief. What the world at large had, for the most part, not grasped. That nonviolence and pacifism did not, in any way, imply cowardice or a lack of the survival instinct. The Levanter way was a path, a narrow causeway most dangerous to walk, but blessed in its very nature, one which left the soul pure and free of those haunting detriments of guilt, and horror, and recrimination. So in the end their core belief held, and the heart of The Levanter remained pure, unto this very day.

The sun spilled across the desert plain and Avarsa smiled.

Hundreds, then thousands of her people started exiting the hidden tunnels which dotted this plateau, this desert wasteland which had hidden them for over six decades from the hundreds of spy satellites that circled the Earth with thermal-sensitive eyes.

Avarsa looked down upon the final fifty pages of the tome, many of which she herself had written in the ancient tongue. Her Great Aunt, Anulla, had begun the initial construction of The Enclave, back near the end of the 20th Century. A monumental act of secret construction which would put the Pharoahs' Engineers, Odysseus's Shipwrights, Area 54, The Skunkworks, The Manhattan Project, and the old Soviet Space Program combined to shame, for unlike them it was still completely hidden, and unknown to the world at large.

In moments humanity began to die.

Every nation upon the earth warred upon one another. Every single people launched its arsenal of biological and radiological weaponry upon their neighbors, all in the name of their own defense, to destroy another before they were destroyed...and eventually only hastening their own doom.

And upon this seemingly deserted mountain plateau, upon rows of portable computer screens, one visual transmission upon another cut out as relay satellites and broadcast units were destroyed by multiple EMP bursts and a Hell storm of heat and explosive pressures which slowly began blanketing the entire blue-green globe.

And of all of mankind only one people remained untouched. The Levanter. All one hundred thousand of them. The only host in existence which refused to take a side. The only nation which would neither accept the patronage of a larger and more powerful country, nor declare war upon any who were weaker.

For hours the very ground shook from the cataclysm which now rocked the world. The entire host of her people stood on the barren plain with her, witnesses to the final day of mankind, peering into the distance for signs of the chaos which was blanketing the globe.

Avarsa showed no fear. Anulla's Grandmother had long ago chosen this plain, this land, this birthplace of her people for both its geologic stability, and its remote location. The nearest detonation was over 100 miles away. Their elevation would prevent groundwater contamination, and the powerful winds, while spreading fallout in their direction, would also eventually sweep the air clean at this altitude. Not to mention powering dozens of now-hidden windmills.

Mara, her sister, nodded once and Avarsa knew it was time. She gave the signal and watched as her people, all clad in the same green protective environmental suits that she herself wore, began their disciplined march underground. The suits were overkill but Avarsa had not wanted to take any chances during the short time her people would be exposed on the surface.

Distant hidden robotic outposts, some as far as 90 miles distant, had been scanning the air for hours for any manner of inevitable radioactive, chemical, and biological fallout. And now the first signs of the approaching death were coming in. It was a holocaust beyond any biblical proportion...but they were prepared.

Finally, only Avarsa was left on the surface. And she hesitated. What would life bring she wondered. Was this the end.? Would things, could things, be better the second time around? Avarsa nodded to herself, knowing there would be a second age of humanity. Looking down at the nearby tunnel entrance she smiled. For a full mile beneath her lay a monumental venture. An entire city, carved throughout fifty miles of massive tunnels, containing schools, dormitories, public kitchens, parks, vast reservoirs of clean water, huge cavern greenhouses already producing tons of vegetables, entire industries manufacturing thousands of solar-cell arrays and windmills, stockpiles of lifetime supplies of medicine, food, alcoholic beverages, liquid and air purification apparatus, fertilizer, seeds, camouflaged radiation-resistant mobile shelters and so much more.

On the horizon, Avarsa could see the oncoming storm of nuclear ash and wind, and she steeled herself. The Levanter were industrious. And they were survivors. For sixty years their combined wealth and efforts had fed the creation of this haven. Hundreds of generations of treasure, savings, and property were liquidated in this unmatched effort. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Thousands of bribes and payoffs to maintain the secret, and avert potential prying eyes. This miracle was the result of a single purpose, a focused effort which dwarfed the construction of the Pyramids and the Great Walls of China many times over. And with this effort were the dozens, hundreds, of Levanter who had bravely sacrificed their lives to keep this secret. Others had outright renounced their vows of nonviolence to do that which was further needed to keep the secret, thus knowingly banishing themselves forever from The Levanter, for the greater good.

When the holocaust of rumbling death was a mere mile away and closing, Avarsa made her exit. The tunnel's entrance doors closed and she felt the elevator begin its descent, taking her down to a truly buried treasure.

But perhaps their greatest treasure laid stockpiled within themselves, Avarsa thought. For as The Levanter had interbred over the millennia with all of the races upon the planet, so had they become the repository of humanity's biological heritage. For there was no greater genetic diversity within a single cohesive group than that which was imprinted on The Levanter.

They would survive. And thus, so would mankind.

By the end of the day the earthquakes had finally ceased.

And as the distant unseen sun set, and Avarsa sat among several hundred children taking their supper in a public cafeteria, a great weight lifted from her chest. She had kept her people's oath. They had committed no violence in their retreat from the larger world. They had forced their will upon no one.

And as the night grew colder, The Levanter, the first and last Nomadic people, inherited the Earth.