Duality

Once upon a time, when the world was not yet mastered by man, plants learned to love the sky. Air flowed about them, and they drank of it with gladness. Sunlight shone down upon them, and they received it into themselves as life. The creatures of the earth came and ate of the plants, taking up their life within them, and the light of the sun became the spark in the eyes of every bird and beast. So life was in the days before.

But life attracts death like a hunter to prey, and much death followed this time of vibrant life. Plants were destroyed and animals torn to pieces, and the mouth of the earth opened wide to admit their entrance. Deep into the crushing depths the dead fell, and in the ages that passed the light and life they once held was distorted by the heat of the earth's heart into darkness and death, a slick formless black of immeasurable taint.

Long this ancient corruption lay, and would have ever done so had man's ambition known limit. Not content with the hoards of silvern earthblood they had wrenched from the depths, man sought out a power to put all others to shame, one that would give them mastery over all the earth and sea and sky. Deep they forged, tearing rock asunder in their craving, until they came to the deepest dark, the viscid remains of a myriad lives, that fated substance they called Petra Oleum.

Aeons in the molten depths had imbued the substance with a fiery heat, and as it burned it shone with light so like the sunlight of times past that had caressed the leaves of plants and sparkled in the eyes of animals that man was deceived, thinking it a power worthy of being wielded, forgetting that no power born of death will ever truly serve life. And so they used it as a tool: with the death of beasts, they conquered the earth; with the death of fish, they conquered the sea; with the death of birds, they conquered the sky; and with the death of plants, they grew and became as fruitful as the verdant host before them.

Yet even after all these things, it was not too late. They still lived, and the creatures they chose to live lived with them. But they had not yet realised their folly, and their eyes were on yet a loftier goal. They had conquered all the nature that lay around them, and so the last thing to be conquered was their own nature. Long did they toil to create cages to bind themselves, cages of iron and oaths and the terror of rejection, but just as this final end hove over the horizon they were forced to abate their quest, at last apprehending the grim inevitability that humanity could only be conquered with the death of man.

Man fell into anomie, and in the throes of their despair they turned on their own works, tearing them to pieces to find a reason for the turmoil they found themselves in, seeking a cause that lay outside themselves that they might not be found guilty for the wrongs that had overtaken them. They discovered many secrets in their deeds of old, dark and ancient things that brought anguish upon all who heard of them, but the greatest of these was found in the power of that deathly substance they had wrenched from the utter depths. From its flame, once thought to be purest light, there rose a darkened smoke, a twisted wraith of the myriad dead with a hunger that rivalled even that of man.

With growing horror man brought to light the paths of this ghastly taint, seeing for the first time the fate of the deaths it embodied. The death of beasts leached into the earth, sterilising the once-fertile soil and poisoning all who lived on its produce. The death of fish seeped into the sea, blighting the creatures who swam in its waters and bringing affliction to all who fished its host. The death of birds rose into the sky, thickening the air into a suffocating smoke and choking all who breathed it. Worst of all, the death of plants covered all the earth with a malign shroud, receiving the sun that shone upon it and making of its light not life for all the creatures of the earth, but a stifling heat, the final curse of the crushing depths that man had so exploited.

So it was that man saw the folly of its ambitions and renounced its thirst for conquest. So it was that the ancient traitor death was found out and faced direct, and man counted it as an enemy.