In the days when the world was (mostly) flat and the oceans, saturated with terrible sea monsters, poured off a sheer edge into an inky well of despair, tumbling down below with fins and scales and teeth, just before a singular sheer edge of certain doom there stood a Tree at the end of the world.
	It has occasionally been observed that animals in an area about to experience a natural disaster will take flight before the event occurs. These are the same animals that possess no scientific method of hypothesis to derive such beliefs we hold as truths, and yet they discover more then we may ever, penetrating deeper then we know exists. These animals live their lives under a moon that obviously circles the world they walk upon, therefore their sun and stars obviously do the same. They walk on a solid earth that cannot be anything other than flat, why, nobody has suggested otherwise. It has always been the power of belief that has defined a world.
	Humans after a certain age therefore cannot reach this Tree at the end of the world. They can only reach the Tree when it is more properly simply a tree. This Tree has been at the end of the world in its own perception for millennia, and it has been the bearer of many a sacred artifact of ancient times; the most famous of which, the golden hide of a ram. Then, its roots were perceived, by the mortal man who removed the fleece, to be fixed securely in the Earth on a land known as Colchis. It was ensured by this man's protectors that he never ventured much further then the tree, for then his beliefs would cause the land beneath his feet to fall away in that tumult of monster-water.
	The moment a child can crawl it has decided, somewhere quiet and soon forgotten, that the world cannot be anything other than flat, and for that time the world is flat. A child makes the same assumption an animal makes. But as it grows, and as things are ingrained into its mind, it believes that not only is the world round, but it has been proven by others who believe it so much they make it true.
	This is not to say that the world is truly flat. What the world is truly is a mystery, save to those who truly don't believe in anything at all. But a flat earth is that which is most evident to limited consciousness, and where we will not understand how animals can see storms brewing from beyond the disc's edges, animals will not understand how we can predict the phases of the moon or sail across the seas unafraid. A belief of the world's nature introduces mysteries as part of the desire of a soul to make their land interesting, somewhere worth living. These mysteries cause us to hone our beliefs as we explain them to ourselves. Of course, the nature of mysteries is that when they are solved, they open up tenfold more.
	Nevertheless, there was a Tree at the end of the world; this is perhaps the only thing we can be sure is truly part of our good old Earth. If a world has ends, there is a Tree at an end. But the interesting thing about this Tree is that unlike the sheer edges of the ends of the world, it manages to remain in any individual's perception, and this is why we know it must be part of real, solid reality. Animals would say humans walking past the Tree somehow transport themselves from one edge of the world to another, and humans would say animals attempting to cross a boundary not far from the tree simply disappear, if an animal miraculously managed to make it to the end of the world and fall off. Needless to say wherever the tree stood in one's perception it was also not a place where animals and people could comfortably convene. 
	Humans as a race tend to believe what they are told to believe, and nearly all versions of Earth from a contemporary human's eyes are identical. To much of humanity, the Tree - but to them merely a tree - stood in the backyard of an old man who lived in the lower right of Australia. (The Greek world placed the Tree, if everything were to scale, at the edge of the Black Sea, just north of the present-day border of Georgia and Turkey. This world was much smaller and as later perceptions changed the world stretched around a ballooning concept and the Tree managed to creep its way further and further from Greece. Were an ancient Greek to show up from the past, adamant on reaching Colchis, it would doubtless confuse the world to observe him sail, completely across land he did not even notice existed, to reach the Tree, but one who believes in a world of this shape does not live today.) 
	The old man who lived at the end of the world had once been an American farmer, and he had moved to a new plot of a very large amount of land for a very cheap price. As it turned out, this was not without catch, as he was unable to get any animal within a mile of the place. He haughtily resigned to simple cash crop farming and had made a large profit by manual labor before he was old. Soon, he resigned himself to seclusion in his uppermost bastion of personal freedom; that was, to him, ending his days writing, writing, and forgetting. 
	High up in his perch of a studio he worked furiously at his loom of a drawing table, weaving vague philosophies with inconclusive closings and narratives of beautiful but insubstantial fabrics. He didn't care. Maybe he didn't know. He did know, however, that that damn tree in his backyard cast such a shadow that his window shed as much darkness as it did light. From his dusty windowsill to his scarred eyes, the inky shadow splattered on any brightness and overpowered it thoroughly. 
	One day the ancient man arose and could not remember what it was that he did in the mornings on a regular basis. So he clumsily made his way to the overgrown wild he had left so long ago, seizing an axe he had left lodged in the earth from under the kilometer long grass, and hacked away at the tree until dusk. And with an agonizing crack, the oldest living organism on this planet snapped over the edge of the world, plummeted into the depths below, and was gone.