THE APOCALYPSE IS NOW "They set out that day to sail for Vinland. Tromdur Svensson planned to be away for just three years. How the gods were laughing at him, at all of them, on that day." -from The Saga of Harold Half-Face 1000 AD. When the North Men from Ingolfsfell sail from their icy fjord in a single longboat, to establish a settlement across the great sea, they thought they would be gone for just three years. They had no name for the Atlantic then; and America they called 'Vinland', the place of meadows. But a storm takes them off course to an island even the legendary Leif Erikson had never seen. These natives are not savages in skins; and they do not build their homes from hides. They live instead in a great city, in the shadow of a looming volcano. And they do not hunt animals; they hunt men with white hair and blue eyes. Their gods come from the skies, and the Apocalypse is ... now. "There is a river that gives us life. You may dam it; you may swim against it. But in the end, it will flow to the sea, with or without you." -from The Book of the Stars, a manuscript of unknown origin, written in Mayan glyphs circa 1000 AD and found in a Viking burial mound in Greenland, 2001