We made the world as per our prerogative. We shaped the soil, molded the clay. Tamed the water, a fire we lay.

  We rose above the world, and we set upon it. We had our task, and we did what we must.

  Light moved as we ordered. Sky bent to our angle. The beasts obeyed the measure. Stone held its silence. Root its purpose. All moved rightly.

  Oh, and the light shun true— taut and white, never wasted. And the water lapsed the earth, and the earth lapsed back, the rhythm of the elements dancing their holy dance to us alone, unshattered.

  The beast ate, it died, and it made new. The rotting corpses made fodder for the ground, the ground split, made fire, steam, and pulp, and made fodder for the living.

  Corpses and grass, rotting and sprouting. Decay multiplies life, and all is good. All is correct. All is the rhythm.

  Life has a task: to live, and die. To take what is needed, and rot when it is done.

  I dug for death and life in the soil. I rose the stone so it might touch the sky, bake under its light, and collapse again. The stone brought so much to the land. I made sure things would live in the darkness, and thrive being blind. Crawling in perfect darkness and feel the damp rock.

  In my domain the living came to nourish what did not think. Did not breathe.

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  My children lived and thrived in this domain of cold and rot. In the darkness they found their place.

  But.

  A vibration I did not intend—low, foreign, not of our rhythm. A hole I did not make, yet it widened. Being. Shape. Motion. Rot where no rot was ever willed.

  I sensed splintering. Fracture beneath purpose. My workings seized, my order trespassed. Gifts repurposed. Tools made idol.

  Rot in heaps. Stacked against design. Death flowering where breath was assigned.

  Light— our light—pulled into places I had buried. Made to glint. Made to show. Meant for no gaze but mine. Now seen.

  I rose my mind and being out of the ground, out of the lungs of the earth, to spot my intruders.

  They were small. And they were disgusting.

  I sensed no meaning in the flailing beings, wriggling under the sun. They hid their forms with corpses and discard of the world. They killed. Themselves, and others. Ate what we had never allowed, ate too much. Dug at my rock.

  I could feel nothing— a blank slate of undoing upon the order we had worked for.

  So we killed them.

  I broke their bones and ground them to ash. The others killed them as they saw fit. Some we stretched and twisted until they made noises so shrill it could no longer be heard. We let these stay, crawling on the ground. They would rot when ready.

  The Wind watched us. A being that had made no contribution to our glory. It watched the twisted. And the dead.

  It watched with such intent that one could wonder if it felt for them.

  There is a reason The Wind was not allowed creation.

  Drift and movement is not enough to live.

  Life shall live until it dies. So we made this Earth