The Story Place - Story 1

It fell, plummeting at speeds faster than any known to the inhabitants of the planet. A seething mass of fiery colour, molten, trailing vapour. It streaked a path across the inky black canopy above the slumbering world. A blazing trail of light, a warning in raging shades of red and violent orange, but the beings slept, heedless.

It fled through the atmosphere, a screaming whistle in its wake. As it lunged for the ground, the world began to sit up, take notice. It was a ravaged landscape. A world in the aftermath of senseless, decimating wars brought on by greed and intolerance. Nothing lived, merely existed. Swathes of land lay beneath barren, blackened debris. Craters burned, choking smoke filled the air and inhabitants of the dying world drank from water sources green with pollution, tasting chemicals and death.

Storms raged across the surface. Snow and ice froze vast stretches of once lush farmland. The seas boiled beneath the lashing of titanic tempests. Worse, any of the huddled beings would tell you, were the winds. Cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, whirlwinds of never ceasing movement, the winds scoured the land constantly. They ceased not their toil by day or night, seeming to work for the eradication of all, be it stone, wood, or flesh.

The flaming angel of death finished its journey, crashing into the world with a force even the barrages of bombs could not have rivalled. Flames, soot, smoke and searing colour screeched into being at the point of impact. For a blissful moment the world paused, everything suspended in anticipation; then it began. Fire rained up, was caught under its voracious wings by stream after stream of eager winds and spread with a speed which nothing could escape. Within a day, the planet burned.

There were none left to see the fire die, the planet slip into silent death. It floated in the void, spinning along its orbit, lifeless, pointless, a lump of rock, nothing more.

Who knew how long it waited. Far, far in the planet's future something fled from a distant star. It raced before the solar winds, buoyed, pushed toward its goal. It was slowing, losing impetus, and it could go no further. It fell through the atmosphere, slowing all the while. The landing was almost gentle. It fell into an enormous crater. A familiar landing site, if it could have known. And there it lay.

Its arrival caused shifts, tiny movements, the merest breath of a breeze and a flexing in the air. Progress was so slow as to be invisible, but things were moving once more, above and below the blackened, scorched soil. It took thousands of orbits for the first visible change to become apparent. Rain. Water, dripping from the blackened stump of a building in the centre of the crater, poised above the small, irregular rock, resting after its long voyage.

The drip continued as the squalls of rain became more frequent. A minute hole was worn in the rock. Cold returned to the world, sharp frosts which expanded and contracted the ice forming in and around the hole in the rock. One morning, hundreds of thousands of years after the rock fell into the crater, the planet's sun broke through the layer of smoggy clouds. It was a brief shining moment, but it was enough to warm the voyaging rock

It shivered, seemed to issue a breathless sigh and split apart. Inside, released from captivity, tiny green spores, invisible to the eye, fell out. A mischievous breath of wind, new and restless, scooped the spores from their rocky bed, carried them on its rushing, whirling wings and spread them across the world...

“...and thus began our world, little ones.”

Mojo could see all the children gazing about them, a few running thoughtful fingers through the lush green grass they sat upon, others staring at the shallow water tinkling over the stony riverbed. She always enjoyed the new faces, the new ears to fill with ancient wisdom, especially when it was this way, seed falling on fertile ground. She was getting too old for sitting on the rocks of the story place though. She wriggled, tried to ease the ache in her back, the numbness in her rear, and waited for the questions to come. When they were answered it would be time to pass on new stories, new wisdom to this generation.