Chapter 20
Life started with a bang. A blue flash rising above the ocean that divided time into before and after.
Space also changed, like us. We were there in the before, but in the after we became something different—aware.
We could feel the trees and the rocks, could reach out with the branches, and knew when the ocean pulled any single grain of sand away or brought it back.
As the flowers turned to follow the light in the sky, we turned and twisted and reached with our new awareness.
Humans are not like the flying creatures or the ocean things.
Humans do not live on the currents of wind and water.
No, they create the currents of fire and scarred earth.
They take more than there is to offer and leave barren wastes where they go.
They are responsible for the bitter air, the putrid ocean.
And they are responsible for us, and the thing we became after.
It is easy to move branches or to cast shade when the light falls beyond the sea.
Traps are easy to use on single prey. The lone humans that came across the ocean seeking to eat the flying and swimming creatures did not expect traps, for they thought themselves the hunters and not the hunted.
With each new catch we took into ourselves, we became stronger, and smarter.
We learned their words and their ways, like boats and search parties and the folly of the individuals that strive to be greater than any single grain of sand among them.
We learned what humans desire and fear. We learned that they do not speak with words on the currents of the air—why would they? No, they speak on currents of lightning.
Send a message in a bottle. Call them to us.
We took entire crews. First the ones that took from the ocean, then the ones who took from our forest to build their caves.
Their memories are so much easier to touch than their forms. It is easier to reach into the rip of time than to manipulate space.
But changing time, changing their memories, means nothing if there is no one to forget.
We called more to us this time, setting a trap in their minds now. You are special. You are different. You are more important than the other crawling creatures among you, so beautiful not in your difference but in your uniformity.
So many came that we didn’t need to take them all. We grew even stronger and smarter, and we wondered. What if, instead calling out to them, we could send ourselves out to them—the rest of them?
Their minds are so simple, not unlike other crawling creatures, but their forms are so complex.
Dark suggestions will not work in daylight.
They have eyes and mouths and fingers and toes, and all of them have to look right when they leave here.
We struggled at first, but now we’ve perfected our forms. The faces, the voices, and the memories, old and new.
They have so much time bleeding out from them, and they don’t even know it. It’s our time now.