Chapter 15
The land, despite its appearance, is not dead, nor is it sleeping.
The land exists as it always has, and it has suffered this thirst before, and will again, and though the crops fail and wither into it, beneath the surface insects scurry and under boulders snakes sleep the days away.
The land feels it all. Every tremor on its skin.
Every tear spilled, every drop of blood shed.
It remembers all and simultaneously forgets everything.
Time means nothing to the land that was once cooled into formation under a shallow sea and now scorches under a baking sun.
Time ebbs and flows, building in layers, one on top of the other, endless.
The land remembers the creatures by the feel of them against it and inside it, not by their names.
The trilobites, the ammonites, the sea turtles, the rhinoceroses, the mammoths, so many of which have gone or changed, evolving, evolving, evolving as living things must, and all before the softer and yet more insidious footfall of man arrived.
Some of the men understand the land. Respect it.
Some wish to own it. Some do both. The land learns to understand the violence of man toward himself as it absorbs the dead flesh given back to it.
The earth feels it in the thrum of battles.
The land has become used to the taste of blood. The richness of it.
There has always been blood.
And in the quiet of the night, the land knows there will be more blood to come.