The Edges of Creation

by Luc Reid

No one was as surprised as the two gods themselves when their creations collided.

“My ocean!” cried Forian, whose creation entailed a series of archipelagos with unpredictable volcanos erupting in what would eventually be found to be a fiendishly complex but utterly predictable pattern, if the mathematics of his race of sentient amphibians ever reached that level.

“What are you doing to my wasteland?” called Hronakolnavololgok, the bronze-eyed, many-taloned creator whose awkward wooden people clawed a meager living from land anenome farming punctuated with bouts of lunatic warfare.

What indeed? The infinite ocean, no longer infinite with the smoking wastelands encroaching on it, poured out across what had been a landscape of unrelieved, sun-broiled rock. It was a disaster of cosmic proportions whichever way you looked at it, with what was meant to be infinite, unpassable, and bounding suddenly becoming interrupted, variegated, and full of possibility.

Forian and Hronakolnavololgok rushed furiously against one another, throwing angels, lightning bolts, pestilences, mountain ranges, black holes, and other annoyances at one another’s infinite, omnipotent selves. They were occupied with this for quite a while, actually, and since neither could be harmed but neither would ever run out of ways to try to harm the other, there was little to keep them in check.

Ages passed this way. When the two gods finally stopped clashing, glaring at one another across the vast firmament, it occurred to first one, then the other to look down at their respective creations, which had long since melded. Without godly protection, a measly few million years had reduced both efforts to airless expanses of dust.

Both gods instantly translated themselves to different spheres of existence in utter disgust.

Down on the surface, nothing moved … but if we were to look closely, we would be able to just make out the eroded shapes of grand monuments– first one or two, then dozens, then thousands–all erected in celebration of five hundred thousand years of glorious peace and cooperation between the amphibian people and the wood people in their accidentally verdant and bounteous world.