75 Time Out of Memory I (2/2)

For the race that would come to dominate the parts of the world they could reach and shape, communities were even more paramount. Without one, it would be that much easier for their unasked-for awareness to lead them straight into despair.

Even in the early days, when their consciousness was only just budding, they knew clearly that isolation from the rest was a fate worse than death. Amalasuintha had seen how bands had first formed for mutual protection and other such benefits, and she'd seen how punishment was often meted out not through swift death but by making the one being punished into an outcast.

But this was something she could not understand. All of her existence, Amalasuintha had been by herself, and yet not. She was distinct, yet she was not separate from the earth, from its web of life energies that cycles and recycles – now a tree, now a rodent, now an owl perched on a branch, waiting for nightfall before hunting.

She was a witness to all of this, as well as a part of it. Thus, she did not understand what being cut off from all that she knew was like. She did not know about the loneliness and pain involved, the despair brought on by the mere act of existing, without anyone else there to help one forget.

She could only observe, and in observing, see that, ah, some had indeed chosen death over continuing without succor; to them, death out of its proper time was more tolerable.

In those early days, she had not noticed that when these sentient energies returned to the earth, the alien elements that had made them that way had also been absorbed and incorporated. They became part of the cycle thereafter. They became part of her.

Amalasuintha gradually developed the capacity to sympathize with those inheritors of the first outcasts – there were always new ones – for though she herself never was and never will be separate from the earth, she'd come to have an understanding of this new truth concerning mortal life.

And so, to those who'd chosen to stay amidst their suffering, she'd chosen to make her presence felt, a balm for their loneliness, if not for their despair.

Not all had the capacity to accept what she offered. Of those who did, there had been some whose awareness then extended past their own skins and into the world around them. They found beauty, and they found purpose. They found things other than someone else's hand to help them overcome the desolation of living.

And having opened themselves up to what this world had for them, some had not been able to help but let others know of it, that they might also share in the bounty of the wilderness. Those whom the outcasts had managed to convince to join them similarly had strong affinity to the earth to begin with, and they also felt the presence of Amalasuintha and were changed by it.

It was thus that new communities somehow grew around many she had touched. They knew about the cycles, the webs, the chains of life, and they accepted these. The seasons, the shifts of the ground under their feet, the pressures built up in the air that would devastate upon release – these were all just part of the courses of energies. This was nature in all its chaos and glory. This was their home.

So it would go.

Meanwhile, the presence of the earth that they all felt but had no name for, they had at turns called goddess and mother. Yet the epithet that had stuck despite the transformations over the ages was ”Amalasuintha,” for it was in honor of what she had ultimately given them: strength.