Before there were trees, before there were streams, before rock and birdcall, the world was only an endless desert — a white, scorched expanse beneath an unnamed light. There were no trunks to reach upward, no veins of water to carve the earth, no rain to soothe; only wind whispering over dunes and silence piled upon silence. Layers of sand heaped like forgetfulness; the horizon was a thin cut against the sky.
In that void there walked a single man — not a king, not a god, but a figure later generations would name simply: the Progenitor. He did not spring from flesh and blood; he appeared like a sigh of dust, a wisp of smoke caught mid-air. The stories say the Progenitor crossed the desert with bare feet, without water or food, sustained by a calm, deliberate will. He walked not to forage or to find shelter, but as if he were keeping vigil for something that had yet to happen — enduring, not in misery but as an act of patience and waiting.
Day after day, night after night, he refused food and drink. His body thinned, his skin darkened, his eyes shone like coals. This hunger was not mere suffering but a deliberate offering — a silent sacrifice. The Progenitor believed that if he endured long enough, something would come to return shape, name, and life to the world. He sat on a dune, hands pressed to the earth, and listened to the desert's breath — the susurrus of sand, the metal hum of wind, the nameless echoes of emptiness.
Time here was different. It did not tally hours as we know them; it stretched and wove itself around his thoughts like a strip of cloth. Sometimes he would rise in the white void and glimpse, as if behind a veil, faint images of a future: running water, roots beneath soil. Then he would lie down again, accepting both the heat and the cold, accepting silence.
One dawn, when his strength finally ebbed and every cell sang exhaustion like the string of an overdrawn instrument, the Progenitor felt that the body could bear no more. He lay down upon the sand and looked up at the blank sky, thinking perhaps his life would end there. Breath thinned; limbs numbed; the mind receded into a fragile expanse. He waited for the end and its absolute stillness.
Then, something extraordinary occurred.
Without sound, without trumpet or wind, currents of essence gathered around his chest. From every direction — horizon, sand, the yawning nothing — colors came together: blue like morning water, red like embers, green like nascent leaves, white like pure frost. They swirled into him, coiling around his heart like a luminous garland. The hues did not clash; they harmonized, each thread like a note in an ancient song.
The Progenitor opened his eyes and felt those currents flow into him. They were not ordinary air nor a hot gale; they were something else — an awakening, the voice of earth and sky. Blue flooded him like water: cool, deep, it washed away the grit on his tongue and awakened a desire to carve downward, to run. Green wrapped him like roots: it quivered into filaments that longed to push up, both supple and tenacious, binding to soil. Red warmed him like fire, stirring the blood and igniting growth. White soothed and purified, knitting scattered pieces into coherent pattern.
With his will, the Progenitor shaped blue into rivers. His hands traced invisible lines and the desert split: a small fissure first, a crack upon the skin of the world. From that seam water whispered forth and gushed into a trickle, then widened into streams that joined to form rivers. The water carved the sand into channels, and at the bends the soil, newly cooled by moisture, roused sleeping seeds within.
Green followed. Life's impulse reached into the softened earth, and shoots — thin and tentative at first — unfurled. Grass clustered, then shrubs, then saplings reached until canopies formed. Roots sank deep and the ground grew rich; hills took hold, stones found their places, and the land received the slow architecture of growth. Trees did not burst forth in a single breath but rose to the rhythm of the Progenitor's endurance — fragile at first, then sturdy as seasons accumulated.
Red and white regulated the process: red to warm the seed, to quicken hidden life; white to temper excess, to prevent delicate shoots from breaking under sudden brightness. Each color had its function, and under his hands they combined into an unseen law, felt rather than named: balance.
Water cut channels and formed ponds that birds and insects would soon know. Soil raised into knolls, stones arranged into foundations, and where roots clung, mulch gathered. From emptiness the world took form. The sky, once a blank roof, reflected rivers and forests. Silence gave way to new sounds: the rustle of leaves, the chatter of insects, the first tentative calls of fledglings. The desolation of the desert was replaced by the layered chorus of life.
All the while, the Progenitor felt his strength ebb with each creation. Every living thing he brought forth drank from him in some sense; with each birth a measure of him was spent. He had thought to yield his life into the ground, to lie buried like a seed, but instead he found himself transformed. His body diminished, yes, but a different part of him — will, longing, intent — poured into the water, earth, and wood.
Yet there was one thing he could not fashion by force: the spirits — the subtle souls of earth and sky, the living breath of the world. These spirits were not the outcome of a single, imposing will; they were the soul of nature itself. They arrived when the land reached a certain ripeness, not because he willed them so but because the world, now bearing shape and cadence, summoned them into being.
The spirits were fragile, elusive, and not subject to command. They manifested as whispers in the water, as the murmur between leaves, as the faint shimmer above stones. They were the first living presences that were not merely matter: tiny animating breaths that taught the land to remember, taught the water its course, and taught the soil how to cradle roots. The Progenitor recognized, with a combination of humility and joy, that not everything could be made by a hand; some things arrive spontaneously — the spirits being the clearest example.
These spirits did not arrive in neat order; they showed up everywhere: in ponds, rustling in reeds; between exposed stones, humming faintly; in the steam of warm earth after a rain. They were the world's first utterances, the invisible custodians that knitted disparate parts into a single living whole. Where a spirit passed, the land listened; where many gathered, a sense of place emerged.
The spirits could not be coerced. They lived by natural law, responding and answering. When a spirit visited the new land, it bowed to the water, whispered to the roots, felt the heartbeat of the river and then tried on different ways of being: some became the chirp of insects, some the mist that lingers at dawn, others the subtle presence that slips into a creature's dream.
With their coming, the world ceased to be an empty stage. It now had a soul to bind its parts together, a voice to instruct the earth on what to remember and a pulse to teach water how to run. The Progenitor, who had begun as an offering of endurance, became both creator and student. He had given the land life, and the land returned, in the form of spirits, a self-governing animation he could not claim as his own.
In time the Progenitor became part of the living order, not as a dominating force but as a thread woven into the fabric of the world. People who later told his tale called him the one who opened the world, yet they reverenced the spirits most of all: the spirits were the mind of earth and sky, not born from a single hand but blossoming from the world's own maturity.
Thus, from a quiet figure sitting amidst an endless desert, from chosen hunger and patient watch, a green world woke. Rivers, forests, stone and plain were born under his steady will, but the most wondrous arrival was the spirits — the first whispered voices of the world — which lent the land a life it could sustain by itself.