75 Time Out of Memory I (1/2)

When the world was young, there walked Amalasuintha, who was earth's daughter, as well as its keeper. The wilderness was her paradise, and it was also her charge.

Her duty was not, however, to tend life and make it prosper, nor to seek out and shelter the weak and the injured from the endless dangers without – she was meant to allow nature to take its mad and chaotic course.

In the cycle of life was an inherent hierarchy, and in its tangle of webs, all creatures ate and all creatures were eaten. Even the last in the chain would die, and when its body returns to the earth, it becomes food for those in the top of that same chain.

So it would go, on and on and on, for such was mortality.

Yet though all things living die, nothing is destroyed. They were of the earth that nourished them, and it was their destiny to nourish the earth right back. All that they'd been in body would be torn apart and broken down, and many would take from their parts what they in their turn needed to live on.

So it would go.

Eons passed thus. Amalasuintha knew only to revel in the countless wheels of existence and ensure they would never break – or be broken only when that was part of their course. She did not know loneliness, nor sadness for all the life around her that would wink out from one passage of her feet to the next. Everything was one in her eyes. Nothing truly dies because it would all renew itself.

The only things that ever marred her unchanging days were those that were not of the earth. Every now and then, storms would come from the heavens in forms that were often visible, and sometimes not. She had no control over when and where alien rocks would fall from the sky – devastating systems, destroying lives, breaking nature's cycles – but it would be the work of a thousand millennia to guide these all back to how they had once been.

Alas, more often than not, what had been so violently altered by forces that were ”other” could never return to how they once were. Their courses were permanently shifted, if not altogether ended, and nature had had no choice but to take the changes that were not of its own making and brand them as its own. Then nature and its keeper did what it was they do. They continued.

During one of these bombardments from the cosmos, what had been delivered was more than just rocks. There also arrived the seeds of sentience. As the giant rocks smashed against the earth's surfaces, they scattered. In time, the seeds within seeped into the chains of life on earth, and in many of those they had merged with, the effects were profound.

This was none more so than in the species that would eventually come to be known as humans.

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Amalasuintha had watched – at first with the usual detachment that was part of her makeup, then with growing interest – as they and the other races infected by sentience broke away from their animal roots.

”Live to propagate” was still the driving force at their core, and for many, it was still ”kill or be killed.” But whether they were creatures of the deep seas or the boundless skies, whether they crawled on all-fours or walked upright upon the ground, the ones who had gained awareness of life and of themselves had one thing in common: they had sought to form communities – solitude was no longer something they could tolerate.