The first people created were far too large, modeled after the gods themselves. Their uprising was inevitable & ferocious; it saddened the gods deeply to kill these other selves.

The second people created were far too small, no match for the beasts & the birds, far too vulnerable for the elements & the water. The gods, deliberate in their design & construction, were nonetheless confused by how weak these small things were.

The third people created asked far too many questions, looked too deep into divine will & natural law. The gods agreed quickly to kill them in their sleep. Good riddance, they said. Centuries passed with the gods mostly happy with things as they were until a child fell from the sky.

The gods, alarmed by the fiery streak in the sky & the distant thud, rushed to probe this latest remnant of the heavens. Soon they halted their approach, ambrosia’d mouths agape — it was not the celestial boulder they had come to expect but instead beauty in motion. Two ears rather than one, two eyes rather than eight, one mouth rather than two. Limbs lithe rather than warlike, and most importantly, a proportion that fit the landscape — the beasts below him, the trees above. No god dared to say what they were all thinking: This creature in every way exceeded centuries of divine skill & taste, imagination & will. If gods prayed, one of them would have said that this star child was clearly the reward for long unanswered prayers.

The star child arose slowly, eyes wide on the surrounding gods. One god plucked a nearly-ripe fruit from a tree, tiptoeing closer as the child gulped. The god kept his honeyed eyes on the child, ignoring the iridescent lock of hair of hair fluttering across his face, his eternally powerful hands twisting away the stem and burnishing the fruit to a luster worthy of the child before placing it on a broad leaf. The star child ate, his body tensed, his gaze surveying possible gaps within these assembled predators.

Each day, he tried to hide from the gods, who grew increasingly enamored with him, giving him pet names & brazenly lurid glances. They brought riches of divine variety & luxury, each new gift as useless to him as the previous. With time, the star child grew more beautiful, his radiant skin darkening & glistening in the sun.

In a rare moment of near-privacy, the hawk god asked, What can I give you, child? A view from the highest peak in the world, the star child said. Now? Now.

Hours later, they alight gently on the snowy windy peak hidden in the clouds. The star child looks skyward, speaking a language the hawk god has never heard. He wants to go home, the god recognizes. The hawk god flies him above the clouds, into the heavens, higher & further than you can imagine. Nobody sees either of them ever again.

*

The gods’ attempts to recreate this star child were slow & bittersweet. All missed the star child so much that any discussion of improving upon the star child (removing the tail, adding a fifth finger) was met with swift rejection and often with tears. Model after model, version after version, was crafted. Centuries-old collaborations descended into factions & mistrust. Spies looted divine designs so frequently that craftsgods created false decoy drawings & coded languages impenetrable to even the most shrewd gods. The landscape was littered with near-children — limbs & fur, entrails & adornments, color swatches & bone fragments scattered to the animals & the winds without a thought.

One night while a design spy rummaged through scrolls of false designs, prototypes (designed to evade all gods save their creators) stealthily crept out of the workshop & into the night. Side by side, they stole through the night, programmed deeply with the command evade, wait, evade, wait. The gods had not imagined them to be fully thoughtful creatures. Some connection to beauty, however, had survived the disappearance of the star child, something so persistent that in the prototypes escape, they paused.

They saw the stars. They forgot what they were waiting for, what they were running from. The night sky wheeled slowly, an eruption of shimmering & cloudy white, punctuated by the paths of star children unseen & unknown hurtling through the heavens. It was brighter than the workshop ever was, bright enough that, had they looked at one another, they would have seen constellations innumerable & not yet named mirrored in one another’s eyes. A movement too subtle to be called a breeze stirred across the plain, bringing a sensation that brought them back to earth.

A beauty ennobled the air they breathed, but only the air in their noses. They didn’t know what it was; it was nearby bush just coming into flower. Approaching the scent, they found their bodies spinning around. A noise nearby compelled them to assess the danger before they could think. The source of the sound? A yellow bird the size of their thumbs flew from a tree, a twig in its beak. Their skin tingled, their hearts beat like they’d never know, their eyes filled with tears. They were terribly afraid.

They walked & started over & over again — each brook, each lizard, each noise awakening in them a fear they hadn’t learned to ignore or temper. Eventually, they collapsed in exhaustion & hunger, their arms around one another, an embodied shelter more than an embrace.

They awoke to a terrain flattened & hardened, far from its varied & colorful beginnings. The gods had used & reused earth in creation after creation so many times that the undulating earth had lost all but its highest peaks. The valleys, created for divine love making, had been filled so long ago with near-human raw materials that only the shallowest of indentations remained. The smallest of animals nestled there at night. Lakes, having lost the protections of this terrestrial rising & falling, ran to the horizon & evaporated. All these escaped prototypes saw for miles upon their first free morning were fish gasping & flopping.

A passing god explained to them that they could eat the fish. They did, weeping & apologizing. A landscape of sorrow & silt & filth & the bones & entrails they spit out were more than they could handle. They begged to be killed or returned to the workshop.

And the sun was enraged, his palette & canvas ruined. His rays no longer danced on the gently rippling waves but practically disappeared atop the ever-cracking earth. He could no longer play & delight in varieties of shadow but had to reconcile himself to the small lines threaded by the bones covering the blank terrain, narrowing at noon to a series of nearly invisible points. It was no longer beautiful anywhere, he thought. It never would be again.

*

[to be continued]