5. Stone Smackers

Ardex had circled the beach for longer than he wanted to admit. He weighed the words in his mind: “Stop the experiments and I will take you back tot he Heavenly Palace.” Who could it be? If it was Father or Mother, why would they not just show themselves? Why didn’t they just do it, without asking permission?

And then the Heavenly Objects. The Heavenmatter that came with the portal. Was it on purpose? Or a fault in the gate? What if it was a lie, a trap that Ardex—the dumbest of gods, he had to be—fell for with enthusiasm?

He tried to take the Windgustwing with him, for Cosmo, but wasn’t able to properly reach it from shore. If he evaporated the water, with a fireball, the wing just flew into the air and only floated down a while later. As if it were a light feather, instead of a massive magical wing.

His actions did reveal a second message, though. “Leave me alone. Stop following me. I can only do this if I stay out of the spotlights.”

That sounded like Mother secretly helping them. Well, the request was clear. But when did Ardex ever listen to requests? Never. Anger and fear won from everything else. He didn’t want to think and talk, he wanted to do. Problems had to be solved, preferably by fire.

If he came alone, was that alright? The message was clear. Stop following—everyone.

Obviously, he kept following.

A short period of running already brought him to the next Heavenmatter. The Heavenly Flowers of Eeris. Whereas the entire world was covered in bacteria tapestries, he now walked into a huge field covered in flowers. They had to be Eeris’ flowers, and no accidental life from Somnia, for the flowers softly sang. He’d never heard another flower make music. Not even on that weird planet Dalas.

He shuffled through them and enjoyed the touch of flowers softly scraping past his fur. The soft stalks and shaking leaves. The beautiful song they sang, which could have been both a lullaby and a dance song. His bright orange fur was well hidden in this colorful garden. Eeris would be happy for at least a year if she knew this was back.

But he really couldn’t tell them now. And did it stay? What if all objects were stolen again if they said “no” to the offer?

Ardex grew restless. He sprinted the final distance. The flowers duck away from his appearance, or rolled into themselves like a snail’s shell, as if they knew they’d otherwise be crushed. They only unfolded once Ardex was gone.

He saw the gate again. But this time it wasn’t alone, a desolate ruin that’s part of the landscape. Creatures now surrounded it. Yes, multiple beings. So many, in fact, that he could hardly count them. Their hard shadows under the hot afternoon sun merged into one huge shadow, as if a whale swam around the gate.

But one shadow was clearly different. It seemed to change, as if it didn’t need to follow the rules of sunlight and shadow. It played with how it presented itself and merrily chatted with the other beings.

Should he call out? Say he came to talk about the offer? Or should he creep up on the group, until they couldn’t stop him and hide the gate anymore?

As you might have noticed, dear reader, my stories usually talk about one or two important choices. Choices that might have created something amazing, but just as many choices I’d rather not have seen. Because one wrong choice, leads to another wrong choice, and another one, until everything goes wrong until the end of time.

He hadn’t spoken with the others. They would never stop their experiments. Darus surely never wanted to go home—he still mentioned Zyme every day. Slowly allow life to blossom here, slowly let nature appear, and never leave.

Could he go alone? No. Life without his siblings, without happy Eeris or sweet Bella, was no life.

As he thought, he crept closer, hid by a large stone. It was easy for him as a stealthy feline. He was proud of himself as he reached the beach unseen and could differentiate the silhouettes. A misplaced pride, it appeared, when the special creature suddenly looked straight at him, and angrily.

Hanah’s fierce eyes stared into his.

The red panda climbed down her gate and yelled something tot he sand creatures around him. They immediately started forcing the gate to disappear.

Ardex wanted to hug his little sister, hold her, take her with him so she could live in the Throne. But if he ran at her now, this certainly would not end well. He pushed himself out of his hiding place like someone trying to put on clothes that are surely too tight.

“Hanah, listen, we want to accept your offer. Please come back. Stay with us a few days, then we all return to the Heavenly Palace. Please?”

“The others are still experimenting and know nothing. We can talk once you stop treating me like a little kid.”

“You are a little kid. Compared to us you’re a baby who—”

Hanah bared her teeth. The gate shook and shivered, dancing on wild waves, until it spit out a new object, surrounded by purple beams.

Feria’s Hespryhound, alive and well, gigantic and growling.

“That pet has … grown.”

The sand creatures broke down the gate more rapidly. Feria’s invented being, the Hespryhound, had never liked him. Something told him this view hadn’t improved since their exile.

Ardex wanted to follow Hanah, but had to flee for a wild Hespryhound first.

Darus offered the next stone, but no Moveling seemed interested. “They can move, but they don’t want to. They can eat, but they don’t want to. Did we just create the planet with the laziest species?”

“Maybe they don’t eat stones, Darus.”

Bella understood the idea. On Dalas all creatures ate stones—but that meant nothing, because they did more weird things there. After every mission they did for Father, he complained more and more about the Dumbos of Dalas. They laughed about it and happily visited to see what they invented this time.

Now that she now how hard it was to create life—and keep it—the laughed no more. Those beings from Dalas might have been the first life in the universe … and the godchildren just laughed at them for eating stones and destroying their teeth.

“What else?” Darus said. “We have nothing else! Sand, maybe. Useless bacteria.”

You might ask, dear reader, why the gods didn’t just use the obvious solution: give those bacteria as food. But you see things through a human lense. These gods live from Lifeforce and have never known anything to eat other living beings. They don’t even consider it—it is literally unthinkable to them. Creatures eat stones or other non-living things, right?

“We have what we always had,” Eeris said. “Remember how we got those bacteria in the first place? The water is filled with particles, matter, things you could eat.”

“Next experiment then,” Bella said with a sigh. She felt really sick now, ready to collapse any second. The shredding just continued. Lifeforce flowed away, out of themselves, out of everything. And where was Ardex?

Eeris tried to collect these tiny particles in the water. Feria, her Green Sister, had far more control over that. But she was never there when you needed her!

Eeris had to feel and think, with effort, which means she stirred the water with her tongue for a while before anything happened. She avoided particles she knew came from stones, and grabbed only particles she knew plants used. That should be best for living creatures, right?

These particles were no larger than crumbs for gods, dear reader, while you wouldn’t even be able to see them with a microscope. If Eeris looked, she saw lines through the air, magical beams, connecting all plant life like a spider’s web. To execute her magic, she tried to touch the right strings from this web.

It took a while before they had collected enough particles to be able to grab them. One breadcrumb is easy to miss, but stacking thousands gives you a nutrient dish. One that the Movelings, hopefully, liked and wanted to eat.

The next group of Movelings was collected and pushed towards the food. Gulvi had trouble swimming with half fins. Even Darus was nervous and stopped making jokes. Bella was happy about that.

“Come on! Eat these particles! Eat,” she whispered to the Movelings. It felt like throwing sand against a wall, time after time, hoping something sticks. In their haste they were now throwing with anything.

Again, most didn’t care and didn’t react.

But here and there, a pudding came to live. A few particles traveled through their transparent skin, to the inside. One Moveling suddenly sucked in a pile of particles, like someone taking a deep breath, and couldn’t stop moving. It twisted, danced, swam, raced every which way.

“Write down!” Eeris yelled. “Eating, or taking in nutrients, is the next characteristic. If you can do that, you can get new energy to use for all the other characteristics.”

“Oh, and additionally,” Darus said, “Even though these animals don’t seem to eat stones, Darus still thinks stones are the best food ever. The fact that he’s the God of Stone and Earth has NOTHING to do with that.”

The group of Movelings shrank further and further. They now had to explore corners of the ocean just to find more. Bella knew of only three more places where they could look. Three bodies of water where they knew Movelings lived: the Wise Sea, the Mayfill, and the very broad Dayriver that branched off of it.

This story, dear reader, played out so long ago that the world was still connected. The entirety of Somnia was a single continent named Volarde. Which means the number of different places was few and they were all close by. But give it some more millions of years, and those tectonic plates by Darus will pull everything apart into the multitude of continents you know from later time periods.

What if Ardex was right? They would end all life before their experiments gave them the final answer? Bella refused to consider it, despite knowing how silly it was to purposely not think about something.

For now they had one amazing group that could breathe, sense, move and eat well. Bella and her siblings left to visit the next of the final three locations.