In the time before time, before cold and before heat, before night or day, there was only her. Not even a pronoun, then—she would later come to tolerate "the Goddess," or sometimes "Mother," or in her fonder hours, "the Shaper"—but first there was only the singular, unpartitioned act of being. Her awareness encompassed the fullness of void and all its unrealized potential; it was an emptiness so total, so perfect, that even the idea of loneliness was premature, an egg not yet quickened.
Creation did not occur as a plan, a sequence, a deliberate act. It happened as song, as sudden exhalation. Where there had been nothing, now there was sound—deep, resonant, a first note that neither echoed nor faded, for there was nothing to catch or dampen it. She observed this with a child's delight and a scientist's curiosity, marveling at the way the vibration of her own essence could pull threads from the dark and twine them into matter. Not that she thought of it as matter, then. Her mind was a place of pure cause and consequence, uncorrupted by the limits of language.
She shaped the first mountain with a stray harmonic, amused by the way it rose, jagged and silvered, out of the shifting non-substance. She traced the line of a river into its side and marveled as it wore the stone smooth, centuries of erosion compressed into a moment. Oceans spread beneath her casual gesture, their surfaces still and mirror-bright, reflecting back an image she did not yet recognize as self.
The first flame startled her. She had not meant to make it, but it took hold with a fierce intelligence and gnawed at the edges of the dry grass she had scattered in an earlier experiment. It glowed with hunger, consumed and transmuted, and its smoke coiled upward in delicate tendrils that caressed her attention. She watched it for a long while, learning from its unplanned invention, before deciding that all her new world should have such fire, and so she seeded it everywhere—a thousand varieties, from the languorous blue core of volcanic heat to the sprightly yellow tongues that would one day flicker in human hearths.
Life—now, life required concentration. The templates were infinite, the variables dizzying. The first attempts failed spectacularly: animals that digested themselves from the inside out, plants that grew too fast and choked themselves in shadow, insects whose only impulse was to form endless, quivering loops and die. She did not despair. The world was her playroom and her laboratory, and the errors delighted her as much as the successes. She watched patiently as, over long centuries, each species refined itself by sheer persistence, the dross of the failed falling away to reveal the beauty beneath. Evolution was a concept she discovered by accident, but once it was named, she was smitten.
She loved her children, every one. Not the way mortals would one day mean it—not with the possessive, needy attachment that presumes an equal and opposite return—but with the vast, disinterested affection of the sun for the planets that circle it. She delighted in the way the birds learned to steal, in the conniving strategies of small mammals, in the slow, contemplative struggles of the trees. Her favorite time was the hour before dawn, when all her creatures held their breath at once, waiting for the next day as if it might never arrive. She felt their anticipation as her own.
In the early days, she walked her world unchallenged, changing forms as it pleased her. Sometimes she preferred to glide along the air as a current, moving fast enough to pull rain across whole continents in a single day. Sometimes she inhabited the rivers, speaking through their rush and bubble, shaping the silt to make beds for spawning fish or widening the deltas for drama. When she craved solidness, she took the shape of a tree or a standing stone, and stood for a century or three while the lichens grew their slow fractal cities across her surface.
Mortals did not exist, then. The closest analogues were the magpies and the weasels, who built nests of found things and delighted in the sabotage of each other's ambitions. She spent long centuries inventing species that would refine the best qualities of these, crossing curiosity with memory, tool-use with collective will. She had no idea what a human would be, only a vague sense of anticipation. The surprise, when it came, was immense and exquisite.
The first proto-humans were a mild disappointment. Clumsy, fragile, aimless things, obsessed with food and mating and not much else. They did not even notice her, and she became incensed, then amused, then finally approving: she liked the idea that her creation could be so complete it needed nothing from her. Still, she could not resist a few nudges. A lucky thunderstrike here, a migration of prey animals there, a sudden flush of berries just when the hunger was most dire. She watched them evolve from distant cousin to upright ape to true person, and found herself deeply, shockingly attached.
The first prayers reached her as incoherent bursts of longing: Save me. Feed me. Make it rain. She responded out of habit, not compulsion, but each answered prayer brought only new dependencies. The more she intervened, the less her creatures grew on their own. She watched a generation grow fat and listless under a season of perfect weather, and felt something close to shame. She understood, for the first time, the limits of love.
So she withdrew.
Not completely—she could not bear that—but she faded her presence, became a shadow at the edge of their perception, a myth or a rumor or a trick of the light. She watched as her humans learned to fill the vacuum she left behind: they invented tools, language, song, violence, justice. They found her footprints in the mountains and decided they must climb them, they found her silence in the forest and learned to revere the absence as much as the voice. They made gods of their own—clumsy, anthropomorphic things, but touching in their ambition. She watched each one with a mixture of pride and nostalgia, like a parent reviewing the artwork of a child who has finally learned to ignore her.
The passage of eons brought with it a sense of accomplishment. The world did not decay in her absence. In fact, it seemed to thrive. Essence flowed through its rivers and roots, balancing itself with a mathematical perfection that defied her own early efforts at symmetry. Species filled every available niche; storms watered and then retreated with uncanny timing; even the volcanic tantrums had a rhythm, a predictability that hinted at some underlying order she had only half designed. She realized, with something like awe, that her creation had become a self-healing, self-improving machine.
At first she was pleased.
But then, slowly, a new sensation crept in at the edge of her awareness. It was not pain, not even discomfort, but an odd sense of dislocation. She would attempt to nudge a river, and find the water resisting her, as though it were following instructions from some other, more local authority. She would try to instill a spark of inspiration in a sleeping child, and the mind would twist away from her touch, so intent on its own dreams that even a god's will was deflected. Her presence became less and less essential, her influence more and more ornamental.
It was then she began to notice the cracks.
The first appeared as a line of golden light across her arm—if arm it could be called, for she wore bodies only as metaphor. The second was a fissure along her side, as though the very act of being was pulling her apart, or perhaps the world itself was outgrowing its container. She ignored these at first, distracted by the ongoing spectacle of her creation, but the fissures multiplied. They wept liquid radiance that burned away her focus, causing her to miss entire seasons, then decades, then longer.
She attempted to heal herself, but the act felt foreign, like operating on a body she only half remembered. She could barely recall the design. Every patch she made only encouraged new cracks to blossom elsewhere. In desperation, she tried to reach out—calling to her humans, her forests, even to the birds and the rivers—but no one seemed to notice her anymore. Her voice, once the world's only law, had become a distant echo, barely audible against the background noise of self-sufficient existence.
This was not how it was supposed to be.
She tried to remember if she had ever meant for it to last forever. Surely, she thought, eternity was the natural state of things; surely she, who had never known beginning, could never contemplate an end. But now the cracks widened, deepening through the substance of her self, each one a canyon filled with screaming light. The sensation was both agony and ecstasy: the world was working so perfectly, so gloriously, without her. She had succeeded beyond her wildest intuition, and in doing so, had rendered herself obsolete.
She did not understand. There were no words in any language, mortal or divine, to describe what she was feeling. Loneliness, maybe, but that implied a need for company. Loss, maybe, but nothing had ever belonged to her in the first place. She cycled through every permutation of emotion she could invent, and none of them fit. She was coming apart at the seams, and it was beautiful, and it was wrong, and she had no one to ask what she should do.
The stars she had scattered across the void at the beginning now looked back at her with cold, impartial eyes. They did not blink, did not weep, did not judge. They simply observed, as she had once observed her children, and waited to see what she would become.
And in the silence between their stares, she realized for the first time that something was very, very wrong.