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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.h.i.+fted, 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.
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 s.h.i.+fts 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 G.o.ddess 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.