When all was new the first clouds assembled above the globe in light and formless delineations. Gently they released the rains upon the land below. The sun warmed the soil, which became profoundly invigorated by this symphony of light and moisture. The earth pulsated and hummed with germination until the first sprouting life tore its way out from the dark to stand beneath the call of the sun.
The lands stretched like clay. Unseen forces slowly pushed up great formations of rock and earth until mountains towered in majestic surveyance of the landscape and ranges of hills arched and curved in playful meandering tracts. The tallest of these formations met the clouds. They gathered cold air and moisture as ice and snow and sent it back in torrents to the earth creating great waterfalls and lakes.
The globe was then luscious and bountiful. It was endless in its fecundity, producing an astonishing variety of plants that emerged from the mud to thrive. Proud trees strove for status in canopies. The flowers flirted, vying for attention through a thousand expressions of beauty. Other blossoms provided still more pleasures, the globe making itself a banquet of scents and flavours and inviting all of life to partake in the great miracle.
From primordial waters came the first creatures. They were slithering and crawling oddities. Eyeless and scale-ridden things compelled seemingly by a search for warmth and food. Their lives were harmonious, initially, for this nascent age was parthenogenetic, the time before predatory creatures first turned to flesh.
A great lake occupied the centre of the globe. It seemed to respond to the dynamic land around it. Over time it pushed forth a mighty fountain, in appearance like a vast pink flower. The waters that cascaded from the tip of the fountain seemed somehow different. The creatures flocked to the great lake and drank greedily from it, becoming ever-bigger, and ever more diverse.
Soon the quiet was shattered by a million different voices. The skies were suffused by the cawing and screeching of winged and feathered creatures. The waters filled with frolicking fish. Large creatures covered in fur, or covered in scales, engaged in duels of strength with the trees, forcing their branches down towards the ground so that life might consume everything.
Yet everything was not enough. Life could never be sated. Desire had entered the globe, and the seeds of carnality were sewn. Many creatures mutated into new and violent forms. They turned on other living beings, devouring the bodies of the weak for sustenance, and battled each other both for meat and for mating rights.
The most curious of all new creatures walked upright on two legs. They were only medium-sized and not gifted with great strength or speed. Their bodies were soft and pliable things, more suited for the sensuous than for survival. Yet they had an intelligence like nothing else living. Quickly they used this intelligence to ascend to a position unrivalled among the other creatures of the globe.
* * *
These new creatures were delighted with their superiority over the other animals. They declared themselves the masters of the globe and took to worshipping themselves as the image of their creator.
The new masters explored their diverse world with curious fascination and revelled in an age of plenty. They pulled handfuls of sweet and juicy fruits from the branches, eating only the prettiest specimens and discarding the ugly and misshapen fruits, or else threw them at each other in play.
They discovered that the consumption of some plants and grains lead to pleasing and unexpected reactions. Fermented fruit sent its drinkers into frenzies of a most enjoyable kind, making music and dancing without inhibitions. When heated into smoke, some leaves would make the masters grow giggly and tingling. Some plants had stronger effects yet. Mushrooms and cacti could offer glimpses of other worlds entirely, the masters brave enough to eat them would walk around in wonder, observing lights, patterns, and forces that only they could see. They tried everything eventually, coughing and spluttering from smoke and heaving under failed experiments. Some even died through experimentation and over-consumption, though these poisonings and affixations were never enough to deter the others.
The flame was conquered and weaponised. The masters sharpened spears and created traps to catch the other beasts, slitting their throats and peeling back the skins, hacking flesh from bone. They learned that their ability to craft tools and manipulate matter allowed them to reshape the globe to better suit their tastes. They tore down trees, rolled boulders, and used bones and hides to construct large ramshackle temples and houses. They extracted burnable fuels from the ground and extracted pretty stones.
The masters grew to love the water for its reflective qualities, for they were as vain as they were curious, and found few things more enjoyable as gazing lovingly at themselves.
Beneath waterfalls and in the shallows of the lakes, the females took to bathing together. The ecstatic males would clamber onto the backs of the beasts and ride them in great looping circles around these waters, whooping and cheering with joy at the sight of so much alluring flesh in one place. They created a raucous din in these moments, bashing out rhythms on the shells of arthropods, and whipping their hogs and mules in a screeching, braying orchestration. The riders looped in and out in overlapping circles, their revolutions, consciously or unconsciously, recalling the act of copulation, for the masters remained driven by the same instincts as the lesser beasts under their domain, and they loved everything connected with the sexual act. They erected phallic shrines and cloistered sanctuaries. They pleasured each other and themselves constantly and rutted on the globe’s grass plains. They discovered every means and method of gratification available to them. And when, at last, it all grew dull, they pioneered new ways to merge pleasure with pain, finding fresh new thrills in humiliation and degradation.
At first, the masters worshipped the great fountain. They prayed to it and blessed their offspring in its sacred waters. When they swam the lake to touch it for themselves and enter its petals, they found it hollow inside. Some of the masters declared themselves spiritual leaders among their species and took up residence within. Daily they drank its waters and bathed beneath it. They drove away the other creatures to keep its waters for themselves. Around the lake, the masters built their own shrines and towers higher and higher, hoping to eclipse even the great fountain. Some less restrained masters were seen urinating and spitting into the sacred water or fornicating within the sanctity of the fountain’s pink seclusion, until, at last, the great fountain seemed to crack and wither, it’s purple tip visibly drooping back within itself above the shrinking waters.
The masters found many other uses for their fellow creatures, beyond food. They staged combat between the fiercer animals, betting and joking among themselves as the great beasts tore each other apart. They stole gigantic eggs from the nests of mammoth birds and lizards, cracked them open and evicted the embryonic forms within. They would climb inside the eggs themselves then, and float atop the flowing waters for leisure; or else, they would drag nets beneath them as they floated, ensnaring fish and other amphibious beings, laughing as they observed the irony of the water creatures flapping vainly, drowning in dry air.
They ripped the heads, hides, shells, and horns from captive animals and paraded throughout the land in the garb of abominations and perversions, wearing wild and bizarre combinations of beaks and claws, manes, and feathers. They cut the horns and tusks from the creatures they thought were most virile and ingested them in the hope of gaining their strength and prowess.
The once pure air became infected by putrid scents of smoke and smog, of rot and decay. The green grasslands of the globe became heavily scarred and littered with shells and husks, with dwellings constructed and abandoned, with the bones and bodies of the abundant dead. The forests were cut back, leaving stumps where once there had been trees. The ground became pockmarked and scarred from the many digs. The avarice of the masters saw that everything was taken from their globe, until the great forests were no more, until their waters ran dead and dry, and many other species had been hunted to extinction, or else had their habitats and food taken from them.
The land was dominated by the joyful voices of the masters. They grew to love themselves more and more, dedicating their shrines to the earthly delights of beauty and pleasure. Their dance was a maniacal one. It was a dance of fornication and fighting, consumption and killing, abuse and waste, and taking without restraint. On and on they danced, filling the globe with moans of sexual ecstasy and music destined to echo throughout time itself, a song of pleasure in perpetuity, and a celebration of their eternal mastery.
* * *
The mountaintops exploded in fire and dust, belching forth red-hot streams that incinerated all in their path, sweeping away the proud edifices of the masters, the stones smouldering and sinking into smoking ruins.
The masters that survived the first eruptions fled towards the safety and protection of the great lake. The diminished fountain trembled and seemed to shrink down beneath the boiling sacred waters. As the fountain disappeared many of the masters, driven wild by fear and remorse, dived in after it. The lake gave them nothing but a screaming, thrashing, agonized death. The rest fled to the hilltops, clinging desperately to their lives.
When finally the fires burned out, the scant survivors were able to descend once again. They found a world very different to the one they had left. Where once they had enjoyed a light and temperate globe, they now lived in darkness, shivering in thin air choked by dust. No vegetation could live on this scorched earth. Most animals had perished. Those remaining were desperate and hungry. The lakes and seas now contained only luminous clusters of sinister and inedible jellyfish that rendered the waters useless. The birds had also changed: scared and ravenous they attacked and harried from above, overwhelming the weak and the malnourished masters, feasting on their eyes and tongues as they screamed for help. Even the insects seemed to endlessly bite and sting, as if they too had nothing else to consume, or else that the impetuous masters had enraged all that had ever lived.
The age of the last masters was brief and wretched, a time of innumerable sad atrocities. The survivors quickly turned on each other amid flame and fear, ripping trophies from the slain, wearing skulls, bones, and ears of the weaker members of their own kind. The special creatures who had once worshipped themselves as Gods came to resemble demons. They filled the air with a degenerate music of rib cages and skin played like war drums and stomachs blown like bagpipes. Deformed and insane, they ripped babies from their mothers’ arms and cooked them squealing. They fed unwilling victims to the beasts, or else drowned them, or gave them to the flames, hoping vainly to appease the heavens once more.
Yet this broken world was no longer theirs. The final masters were hollow and sad creatures, their faces etched with incalculable regrets as they came to understand the paradox of their fate. Free will had been forced upon beings too flawed to choose restraint, and it had made them most unworthy stewards.
The masters were long gone when the clouds were finally able to drop clean rain once again. Over time, this water came to purify the lands of the globe. Daylight finally broke through the dust clouds to invigorate the soil in a symphony of light and moisture. The earth pulsated and hummed with germinations, until the first sprouting life tore its way from the dark once again, to stand beneath the call of the sun.
