In the beginning
Chapter 1 The beginning
Load Full StoryThe cave was warm and humid, and was dimly lit from a pool of lava off in the distance. On the opposite end of the lava was a pool of warm water, surrounded by minor plants, barely clinging to life. The roof of the cave was covered in stalactites and minor stalagmites were covering the ground. There was a clear path on the ground of the cave, one end led to a rather large and loose rock, and the other led to a most peculiar thing. It was a large chunk of earth shaped as a sphere and was filled with holes that were emitting a powerful, seemingly alive light. This chunk of earth was inside a crater, and the path leading to it seemed to form into a pedestal. The chunk of earth started spinning, emitting an even stronger glow of light, along with a fog-like essence. This essence seemed to gather at the pedestal, forming a ball of light. The ball of light continued to grow larger and larger, until it was the size of a cat, and then the chunk of earth stopped rotating.
This ball of light, after becoming fully formed, started floating about the cave, getting an understanding of its surroundings. It sifted through the lava unharmed, and swirled around the stalagmites, while making a cheerful noise. The chunk of earth beckoned the ball of light to come towards it, and it did. The ball of light was just a speck in comparison to the chunk of earth before it; it was a perfect oval, about thirty feet tall. The ball of earth emitted a loving pink glow, which enveloped the little ball of light, which seemed to approve of this greatly and returned the favor by emitting its own pink glow.
The ball of earth then started emitting a light fog from itself, which slowly formed into a circle. This circle started taking on color and some shapes on the surfaces. It was first covered in blue, which began to flow across the surface, then brown surfaces started sprouting out of the flowing blue, which then started growing green trees. The ball of light understood what this all meant, it was being shown a projection of the planet earth, which they are on right now. The image zoomed in, past the crust, one fourth of the way inside the planet, which then displayed a cave. Inside the cave was a ball of earth, the same one that was emitting this very image, and it was manipulating the earth around it. The ball of light now knew what this chunk of earth was, it was the very spirit of the earth. It started moving around in excitement with this new found knowledge, until the earth spirit had calmed it down.
The image then zoomed back out to the full view of the earth once more. Vegetation started covering the ground on the projected earth, and the surface was covered in lush forests and blue oceans. Then creatures started to emerge from the dirt, and feasted upon the plants, there were even some creatures that formed in the oceans to feast upon the vegetation that grew in the oceans The ball of light knew what all of these creatures were, the earth spirit gifted it with knowledge of all the creatures that the earth spirit created.
These creatures started to breed, and more and more of them were coming to life on the planet. The vegetation was growing lower and lower, while the creatures grew more and more in numbers, so the earth spirit created another type of creature to add balance. It added predators of many different species to feast upon the ever growing peaceful creatures, so that they would not consume all the vegetation. And a balance was found in this, the predators kept the plant eating creatures numbers low enough to maintain the vegetation. But the earth spirit was not satisfied with this alone. It wanted beauty to spread across its planet, not simply rampant growth, so it added another species. All of the species that were added thus far have acted on instinct alone, and could only feast and breed, but this new species was created to be much more intelligent. Instead of the four legged beasts that roamed the land, this one still had four limbs, but only used two for walking, the other two had hands, which allowed for more detailed work then the other creatures could accomplish.
The purpose of this creature was to organize the plants that grew in the land, and assist them even further. This new creature performed its purpose quite well, and the face of the earth was filled with much beauty, but as time went on, the two legged creature started finding new ways to perform its duties. It created tools to help it farm, and created shelters to live in. In time they started creating more advanced tools and shelters, expanding more and more, with hundreds, then thousands living in the same area. These creatures continued to advance, and soon not even the predators of the lands could wither their numbers. Eventually the creatures lost sight of their original goal, and had a mind set purely on progress. As their tools grew more advanced, they grabbed more resources from the earth, slowly draining it. Some of the new tools this race produced were emitting pollution into the atmosphere, harming the earth even further. As time went on, it grew worse and worse.
The ball of light emitted a sad blue glow while it watched this transpire, and the earth spirit, seeing this, paused for a moment to comfort the ball of light. It then beckoned the ball of light to focus back onto the projected earth, as the story was not over yet. These creatures continued to progress for some time, draining more and more resources from the earth, and polluting it even further, until a darkness emerged. The ball of light understood everything that came out, until this thing, it held no information about it in the slightest. This darkness swept across the world, tainting all living creatures it touched. Most of the intelligent creatures were unaffected, and had to fight the others in order to survive. Using their tools to aid them, they managed to clean up the tainted beings, and secure their well being. The darkness dove into one of the creatures, infecting it directly. This infected one wielded dark and devastating powers, but instead of attacking the others directly, it used its powers to craft new creatures to wreak havoc. One of the beasts it created was a giant tunneling worm that consumed everything. The other beast was a creature of ice, which fed off of the negative emotions of others. It was an intelligent and elusive creature, which used the negative emotions of others to encase them in ice, then feast upon them. These new monstrosities wreaked havoc amongst the two legged creatures, but they were a stubborn breed, and pushed through these horrors. The dark one, seeing that its new creatures were not going to be able to finish off the rest of them, then rose up, and the entire solar system was brought into perspective of the little ball of light as it bear witness to what the dark one did. The dark one mustered all of its power, and in a flash, all of the planets stopped, and remained completely unaffected by the sun's gravitational pull. The effects on the earth were catastrophic, one side was forever exposed to the sun, and grew too hot to support any life, the other side of the earth, with no exposure to the sun grew too cold to support life, and became a frozen waste land. Not long after, the last of the two legged creatures died off, and the dark one took off from the solar system, leaving it in its disastrous state.
The earth spirit showed the ravaged earth to the ball of light, and the ball of light emitted a sad dark blue glow, nearly going black. The earth spirit comforted the ball of light with a light green glow, and urged it to look back at the image. A ball of light came forth from out of the projected earth, and spread a glow across the entire planet, helping to restore life and the balance with the sun once more. Plants grew back, all the creatures returned to life, and the earth was purged of the monstrosities that once plagued it.
The ball of light knew what needed to be done, and shone red with pride. The earth spirit was pleased with the ball of light's eagerness, and forced the image of earth to dissipate to nothing. The earth spirit then manifested another image, but this one was not to tell a story. Thousands upon thousands of small strains appeared before the ball of light, and it inspected them. These were all the essences from the creatures that once lived on the planet, stored within the earth spirit. Every time the ball of light came into contact with one, an image of what the creature was had been shown before it.
After hours of inspecting the essence, it had finally chosen which one it wanted, it went up to the essence that was the horse. Before it did anything else, it made some changes to the structure of the essence. It took samples from several other species to increase the abilities of what it was going to make. After combining them into one essence, it absorbed it into its very being, and begun a transformation. It started off extending itself into an orb about the size of a large dog. The orb had a hard exterior, and was shining many different colors. After many hours, the orb cracked open to reveal an infant horse. This horse was a pure white, had a horn on its forehead, and wings on its side, and took more of a feminine build. After bearing witness to this, the earth spirit glowed with pride at the infant's accomplishment. The white foal pounced around in joy with its newly discovered body, poking at everything with its hooves. It stood before the pool of lava in the cave and poked at the lava with its hoof, although it could tell it was hot, it did not burn the foal. it was most entertained by this experience, and tried the same thing with the pool of water on the opposite end. It even attempted to fly with its wings, but they were still too underdeveloped to accomplish flight.
After the foal was done fooling around, it returned to the earth spirit, with a grin plastered across its face, still giggling in delight. The earth spirit was very pleased with the foal, and showered it with pride. The earth spirit then calmed the foal down with a gentle glow, and displayed another image before it. It displayed the foal leaving the cave, and ascending to the surface of the planet. The earth spirit wished for the foal to explore the earth, so that it may truly understand what lies above. The foal understood this, and walked over to the giant rock across from the earth spirit. Above the rock was a tunnel, which lead directly to the surface, light could be seen from where the foal stood. The foal gave a final smile, before it levitated upwards towards the surface atop the rock.
