Sixty Four

Bird was floating in a shallow, tepid ocean kissed by a golden sun. She had never seen the ocean, but was aware of its existence, and this was her first time being in one. The warm water lapped at her skin and gently rocked her as if she were floating in the womb. The sun in the sky began to move slowly toward the horizon. As it began to disappear, and night fell, the moon rose. This was a moon unlike one she had ever seen before.
Roughly twice the size that she was used to, it loomed in the sky, and details of its terrain were clearly visible. It was waxing gibbous, and on the dark side of the terminator, glowing orange seas of lava dominated the obsidian landscape. As the moon journeyed overhead, she could feel her body rise with the tide. This celestial dance of sun and moon began to slowly accelerate.
Cycles of day and night became incomprehensibly fast, turning from an unsettling strobing and eventually becoming a constant twilight that she could observe and understand. Her brain had become overwhelmed with trying to figure out whether it was day or night, and decided to split the difference in the form of an optical illusion, similar to when trying to decipher something on a television screen.
Land began to grow forth from the sea, slowly at first. It was born as bare rock and regolith. Bird became fascinated with how the tide interacted with this brand new landform. It was a sort of liminal space that couldn’t decide whether it was land or sea. Constantly washed and laid out to dry, abused by the elements.
She noticed a single cell. Her perception was all out of whack, but this miniscule pocket of life was demanding to be seen. She was able to bring her perception to bear on this insistent little mote, and could feel emotion and the beginnings of thought from this creature somehow. She felt its hunger and utter loneliness.
She watched as the tiny cell divided and began to build its number, dividing and dividing again, driven by its hunger. It snaked its way onto the new landform, lacelike, looking for sustenance, growing its body the whole time. It scoured the land looking for chemical energy, which was found in the regolith that lay upon the bedrock. In its wake, soil could be found.
Once the land was covered in soil, the creature had grown itself into a vast web that covered the land from shore to shore. The web shook itself and began to claw its way beneath the soil it had created. Great tubular trees began to issue forth from the dirt like fingers reaching for the sky. They rose, grew, and died, adding to the soil the entire time.
The ocean was stained red briefly and then back to a shocking blue. A great migration came from the sea. Creatures in their multitudes basked in the tidal zones and changed their bodies to suit their new air breathing lives. Ferns and trees began to populate the land and out compete the web of life that had made the soil. The bodies of these plants began to pile up and compress into dense vegetative mats. None of the life on Earth knew how to eat this novel material.
This happened for aeons, until there was finally a breakthrough and Mycellus figured out how to gain sustenance from the bodies of the dead. This geological epoch where Mycellus hadn’t figured out this trick had left untold resources buried beneath the surface of the Earth. Once sequestered, these resources transformed into pure hydrocarbons, poisonous to the web of life that thrived above.
Bird felt emotion from the web once again. This time it was panic, and a fear of death. Competition had continued, and it was not going well for the young Mycellus. From this panic, a single thought was made clear to her.
She understood that this life form was being relegated to the evolutionary dustbin and it knew it. It was being outcompeted on the very turf that it had created. Rather than go gently into that long goodnight, it decided to change its strategy. It surmised that you can’t lose a game that you aren’t playing, and decided to be the field on which the game was played out. If it made itself indispensable to the process of life, then it wouldn’t run the risk of becoming a forgotten piece of history. Plans were hatched, opportunities were sought, and Mycellus transformed itself from chess piece, to chessboard. In the process deifying itself.
Continents drifted about and collided. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and meteor impacts all came and tried their best to sterilize the earth, but Mycellus refused to let them. Always willing to build himself and the life that he bore back up from scratch. Life went on successfully.
A meteor impact happened. Nothing too out of the ordinary. From how Bird was perceiving time, a couple of them happened every minute or so. They would have an impact on life but never anything too catastrophic. This one was different though. From the crater that it left, another web of life appeared. This one was crimson to let her know that it was malicious. She was quite sure that she was hallucinating and Mycellus had control over her mind.
This crimson web started slowly but steadily making its way from the scar it left on the Earth and gaining territory. Small battles were fought beneath the soil and Mycellus began to lose ground. The very air itself seemed to change and the climate grew stifling. The red web reached into the Earth and tore open great trenches, exposing the magma below. The sky grew dark and the sun was hidden by ash.
Mycellus, thinking all was lost, appealed to the life that he had been fostering for so long. They owed him a debt, and it was time for repayment. He chose Champions from their number to go forth and battle for him in ways that he couldn’t. Also, in ways that the red web couldn’t.
In a stroke of luck, the continents at that point in history had been arranged in a landform called Pangea, so this pitched battle could take place in one large venue. The red web wasn’t fond of the sea, and Mycellus was able to use this to his advantage and drive it into Pangea’s interior desert. This land was not taken easily and Mycellus took enormous losses.
A great battle was fought in the desert. With the red web fully surrounded, it and Mycellus made themselves into titanic creatures and fought it out the old fashioned way. Though, from Bird’s point of view it looked like two toys battling in a sandbox.
Once that threat was overcome, it was back to life as usual. The battle had been very close and the number of species left was shockingly low. The oceans were almost completely devoid of life from hypoxia, and barely anything crawled the land. Mycellus began again though, and soon the world was teeming with life.
Dinosaurs were a thing for a little while, and they were pretty impressive. The impact that ended them held no red web, so that was a relief. After that mammals steadily gained ground, and the surviving dinosaurs took to the air. Once humans started walking the face of the earth, they disappeared as abruptly as they had come into being.
When Bird finally came to, she sat in the river silt for a couple of minutes staring off into the night. The light breeze of the evening played gently with her hair, but she paid it no mind.
“Bird, are you alright? What did he do to you?” Fyndraxis asked as gently as he could.
“He made me understand,” she said, half conscious.
“Understand what?” He asked, still concerned for her wellbeing.
“Everything. What he is, what Earth is, what we are. We are lucky he didn’t break us down for parts. We are nothing to him, but in the same breath he cares for every living thing. And he’s so old, he was ancient when the continents started to form. He showed me everything. Everything from his birth until now, I can’t really convey how unbelievably old he is in any meaningful way to you. He has looked after this planet and ruled it through sheer force of will since day one. He is a god, but not a supernatural one. He is life,” she said, astonished.
“I mean, I knew he was a big deal,” Fyndraxis waffled.
“A big deal doesn’t even get close to what he is. He’s the biggest deal. I can’t believe we got mixed up with him. And me being his Champion, fuck man, I really didn’t know what I was getting into. I’m here until this Wendigo thing is solved, no matter how many millenia it takes. He has had Champions before, thousands of them. Never a human though. He was never able to impart this kind of knowledge. I’m in way the fuck over my head with this guy. I could be his puppet, but he lets me have free will because he thinks it’s fucking cute. And you, hell, you scare the shit out of him. Artifacts like you and Terra are completely out of his control and he doesn’t like that. Can you imagine having dominion over a planet for a billion years and then some dude in a sword comes along and has the power to change the way the fucking world works?” She had gotten up and was pacing while she talked.
“What do you mean?” Fyndraxis would have been pacing too, but he settled for slowly following her around in his sphere.
“You could take your hunters right now and start eating everything you see, you could dominate the fucking planet. But you don’t because you aren’t a complete fucking dingus,” she had stopped pacing and turned to face him.
“Shit, right. No wonder he was pissed. I thought it was about not being able to decrypt the Wendigo traffic,” Fyndraxis said, realizing that his bold strategy from earlier had been way off base..
“You wouldn’t do that though. Right?” Bird asked seriously.
“I have no interest in ruling the world,” he answered honestly.
“Good, because from what I can tell it’s a shitty job. Constantly juggling threats and trying to maintain balance. It’s fucking awful. He started life as a single cell. So utterly alone. He figured out how to make this world work, just by fucking winging it,” she had gone back to pacing.
“So, what do we do?” He had given up on trying to follow her around and let her kind of orbit him.
“Well, I’d love to go to sleep, but apparently I don’t need to do that anymore,” she threw her hands in the air.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“The powers that Mycellus has granted me keep me juiced up so I don’t need to eat or sleep. I love doing both of those things,” her pacing was over with, and she sat back down in the silt.
“How about a fake nap in my keep? I’ll even make you a fake dinner,” he invited.
Bird chuckled at this and threw up her hands.
“Sure, fuck it.”