Creation Story

Modern Day Legend: Creation Story

I remember a time when I was older, larger. I was there a moment after the first spark reproduced and I’ll be the one to hit the lights on the way out.
Things were calm for a good long time. Nothing much expected of me, and honestly I wasn’t bright enough to get bored. I had no shape, no set duties. I was just there, and that’s all that was needed.

The world swirled around the sun, and things began to change. Swimming things, crawling things, all in a madcap race to eat something before they got eaten. I followed them out of the sea, picking off the ones that were too adventurous—or not enough. It took a while, but things really picked up. All kinds of new motions: walking, running, flying... and still, I was just there, in the same way as air and gravity. The skin changed, too: scales, then feathers, then fur. Now that I look back on it, had I had the sentience I do now, I would have marked you for extinction. Tiny fast food meals for the lords of the earth.

Then, bam! They’re gone. And out of their ashes you crawled, and grew. Not just in size, but in brainpower, too. Shortly after you started using sticks and stones, you started using words, too. And one of them was, “why”?

She of the Thunder was born around the same time I was. Called up out of next to nothing to explain things. And I was given a form. I wasn’t as large as I had been, but I was still huge. I rested my wings, and there were valleys. I raised them, and there were mountains. I could form thoughts, finally, and I found I liked the carrion-eaters. Not just the vultures, but hyenas and beetles and others as well.

Your myths shaped me further, and coerced me into choosing the carrion birds as my kind. It wasn’t until much later, when you were stacking giant blocks on top of each other in some hare-brained attempt at immortality that I started playing with the idea of holding a form close to yours, just so I could get a closer look at you.

To this day, you’re still obsessed with me. Avoiding me, outwitting me, staying one step ahead of me, making deals with me. Yes, you’ve added a few years on to your expected time since you started out, but nowhere close enough. And you can quit hiding those coward mummies from me underground and in confounding buildings now. I’ve caught on to you, you prissy brats.

By the way, you can stop patting yourself on the back about the fire. We held off on it for a long time because you were so damn clumsy. If we didn’t want you to have it, you wouldn’t. End of story.

Now, when you take something you’re not supposed to have, that’s when we get mad. Not that it happens too often, but it has. Atlantis didn’t sink itself, not by a long shot. They forgot who we were, and how much trouble it had taken to get to this point. They took shortcuts, and got too close to having it right. And we don’t give warning shots.

There’s been a few more upstarts since then, but they’ve gone more quietly. All of them either looking for or stumbling across immortality, and for a while it was as simple as having them “disappear”, and the threat was gone.

Then Simurgh and I had a chat. Something about “excessive force” and whatever. It ended in the Promise, and I no longer chose who went and who stayed. At first I was furious, but then I realized what a release it was. No more trading cows for children and all the mess that went with it, just cleaning up afterwards with my adopted kin. Of course, you geniuses haven’t quite caught on yet, so I’ve had to make myself scarce so you’ll quit pleading with me.

Of course, now that you’re waiting for a science class skeleton in an impressive robe and a giant harvesting blade, it's not as hard. The stuff you kids come up with…





Copyright Dillo 2004
dillo.deviantart.com

Special thanks to:
The Birds of Belize www.ambergriscaye.com/birds/vu…
Birds in Suriname webserv.nhl.nl/~ribot/english/…
Smoky Mountain News “The Unique Beauty of the Much-Maligned Vulture” by George Ellison smokymountainnews.com/issues/0…
The song “O Death” www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtr…
And, of course, www.google.com , ‘cause I’m lame like that.

This is not at all plot-driven, and is subject to change.