LingZi

Long ago, in an age before humans had given names to the years. The earth belonged to other, larger things. That evening, a long-necked beast stood at the edge of a lake, drinking. The water was flat as a bronze mirror, reflecting the entire burnt-orange sky. Its lips touched the surface. Ripples spread. The sky shattered and reformed. Then the sky truly shattered. The light was not like the moon, nor like lightning. It was a color no human had ever seen—somewhere between silver-white and spectral blue, as if someone had compressed the entire night sky into a single point and hurled it at the earth. The object began to break apart while still high above. There was no explosion, no roar—only an impossibly fine hum, like countless needle-tips piercing the air at once, boring into the bone-seams of every living thing from every direction. The beast raised its head. Water dripped from the corner of its mouth. It turned and ran. It did not get far. The object split into several pieces, each trailing fire, falling in different directions. The largest struck the eastern plains of the continent. The sound caught up later. First, a white wall of heat rose along the horizon. Then came the wind. The long-necked beast at the lakeside had taken fewer than two hundred steps. The wind lifted it off the ground. It turned one very slow somersault in the air, then fell. After that came darkness. Dust blotted out the sun. The sky became a sheet of dirty gray, drawn shut for years upon years. Ash fell from above—into the soil, into the oceans, into every breath. Without light, the green was erased from the land. Then went the grazers. Last went the hunters. Those colossal creatures walked slower and slower across the cracked plains until they died. Some died still standing, their skeletons propping up their bodies like dead trees, facing a sky that would never brighten again. But the ash carried something else. Where it fell on stone, the surface changed. Where it fell in water, the watersheds changed. Where it fell on wind, the atmosphere changed. As if an invisible hand, following a blueprint, was reshaping this planet inch by inch into something else. Mountain ranges rearranged. Rivers changed course. The blue of the sky deepened by a shade. The air tasted different. This hand worked for a very long time—tens of thousands of years—with a patience beyond reason. Then, deep in the crust, several buried fragments of wreckage stirred. The southern ones woke first. In places of absolute depth and darkness, certain things grew warm again. Liquid began to flow. Gas began to circulate. In the deepest chambers of the wreckage, something was awakened. The things were small—smaller than a thumb. Curled inside layers of transparent membrane, suspended in warm liquid. They were not quite alive. They were seeds. The first batch did not survive the day the membrane broke. The air outside differed considerably from what the blueprint had envisioned. The ship took them back. Disassembled them, Read them, Revised them, Started over. The second batch lasted a few more days, but could not hold on either. The third batch. The fourth. The tenth. The hundredth. Each round of death brought the answer one step closer. Finally—no one knows which batch it was—a few survived. When they crawled out of fissures in the hillside, the sunlight stung their eyes shut. Tiny, soft, dripping wet. They did not know what they were, nor what lay buried beneath their feet. They knew only two things. Hunger, and cold. What came after was slow. They learned to stand. They learned to speak. They learned to make fire—not fire struck from wood, but fire that grew from their palms. They gave themselves names, gave names to rivers, gave names to stars. Deep in their abdomens, a furnace grew. That furnace was called a spirit furnace. And they were called spirit warriors. They called themselves children of the earth. But not every fragment of wreckage hatched the same thing. The northern fragment was the largest, sunk the deepest, buried in permafrost where sunlight never reached. It was trying too. One batch, two batches, a hundred, a thousand. It tried for a very long time. Failure after failure forced adjustment after adjustment. What it finally hatched survived as well—but survived as something else. Those things did not learn to speak. Did not learn to make fire. They knew only two things. Hunger, and hunger. That fragment did not stop. Later, the children of the earth grew up. They stopped calling themselves "them." They called themselves "we," and then "I." Once there was an "I," there was a "you." Once there was a "you," there was a "he." Once there was an "I" and a "he," there were walls. They built walls. First, low walls of stacked stone, encircling a well and a few thatched shelters. Then the low walls became high walls. The high walls enclosed villages. The villages grew into cities. Between cities, lines were drawn. The lines were called borders. Thousands more years passed. No one remembered crawling out of the earth, nor the wet membranes, the warm liquid, the predecessors who had died batch after batch. They turned those things into legends. The legends became myths. The myths became clay idols enshrined in temples. Those clay idols never truly became myths. But that was something they would learn later. ......