Chapter 65 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 65: Harvest and Hibernation 09
"My time is running short," Gaia said. "This is my last autumn."
"I'm sorry to hear it." Lucita lowered her eyes, scanning the colorful forest below the mountains and the rising cooking smoke. "Do you have regrets?"
Regrets?
Gaia did not answer.
They did not know when they had woken. When they did, the world was all chaos and silence.
They wandered without direction. In those days, time and space were both formless.
Until, out of boredom, they created the first “life”.
Space held the sky and earth apart; time became a river, reflecting all things.
A cascade of futures swept past their eyes, light and shadow shifting and shimmering, like a bolt of lightning illuminating this egg-shaped planet.
The gases began to move. The wind rose.
Space held the sky and earth apart; time became a river, reflecting all things.
They walked beside the river of time, dredging up glimpses of visible futures.
In the beginning, the future was singular.
Life would wither and die, and so they wove the rules of birth and death and decay, that things might multiply.
The world was too silent, and so they wove light and sound into it. The cries of animals spread across the land.
And at last they gave the most precious gift of all: intelligence.
In that moment the river of time blazed bright, and countless
Gaia understood then that “intelligence” had given her most beloved children the power to change the world, the power of creation.
That meant they no longer needed her gifts to build a beautiful home for themselves to flourish in.
But it was not yet enough.
Gaia gave the elves dominion over life, gave the dragons dominion over space, gave the merfolk dominion over spirit.
Finally, they gave humanity the dominion most filled with creative possibility: the dominion of magic.
They had at last handed over the authority of the world entirely to their children, full of eager anticipation for what new creations they would bring forth.
After all, compared to the elves' and dragons' enduring lives of a thousand years, a human lifetime of a hundred was particularly brief. And it was precisely this brevity that had given humanity its astonishing speed of reproduction.
A constant flow of fresh blood would bring infinite possibility to humanity's creative progress.
Gaia watched her creations with satisfaction, and drifted into a weary shallow sleep.
Only to wake and find that nothing had developed as they had imagined.
The world had been torn apart by their children, and even their own power had been slowly stolen from them through human ritual.
Gaia was bewildered for a very long time.
They had considered sending floods, erupting volcanoes, clearing this canvas entirely and beginning again. But when the hand of destruction began to descend, it stopped, held back by the weeping face of a small girl.
It was soft, warm. The faintest stirring of blood moving beneath the skin.
Gaia felt, for the first time, what they called “compassion”.
“They” had been touched by humanity, and they became “she”. The infinite shrank into something finite. The undying body was drawn into the cycle of growth and decay. She came to know her own beginning, and foresaw her own ending.
Gaia sighed, resignedly, and again and again sorted the tangled order of the world, gathered the surviving sparks of living beings, then watched those beings inherit a broken civilization only to repeat the same mistakes.
But now she was nearly at the end.
Did she have regrets?
Gaia heard Lucita's question and paused, as though something had caught in her throat. At last she gave an answer that addressed a different question altogether: "Twelve cycles of destruction and beginning again. Five thousand brief years. From my perspective, nothing but a fleeting moment. But it is the only thing I have ever done. Even if it looks like a failed creation."
"Not necessarily. It hasn't reached its end yet." Lucita said easily. "Perhaps your children will be a little wiser this time."
"It seems they may be. Since you arrived, I have seen some great changes."
On that note, Lucita looked up. Her clear black and white eyes reflect the turbulent autumn stream: "What is it that you hope for from me?"
"In the countless futures I have seen, only the future in which you arrived gives the world a chance to continue. You can save this world, Lucita."
Lucita listened patiently to the end, then spoke without haste: "I know you may be all-knowing, and I believe the futures you see are real."
She didn't know where Gaia was. Her gaze traveled around her surroundings, then settled directly on the open expanse of clear autumn sky in the distance: "But I'm afraid I have no interest in being an untiring cleaner-up of other people's messes."
Gaia was mildly taken aback.
The divine presence seemed to look Lucita over once, then said: "You are a very audacious girl."
Lucita asked, entirely unabashed: "Then, will you kill me?"
"Oh, child." Gaia sounded as though she had heard something funny. "Of course not."
"I simply hadn't expected, why would you refuse? After all, wherever you came from, you have left your mark in this world now, haven't you?"
The last sentence, Gaia said with great certainty.
As the master of this world, she understood better than anyone — Lucita's soul had already passed entirely through the world barrier's resistance and merged with this world.
Which meant, in a certain sense, Lucita was already a native here.
Why would anyone be unwilling to defend their own home?
She didn't understand.
"I genuinely hope this world will become better. Only, you're asking too much of me." Under the divine presence's searching gaze, Lucita said: "If someone is determined to destroy themselves, saving them from the outside won't do any good."
Then, as a final word: "As it happens, I have some business that will take me out into the world. If I happen to encounter something, I will naturally do a few things that might perhaps suit your wishes."
Lucita opened her palm. The silhouette of the silver-cased pocket watch surfaced there, the scent of new life and danger intertwined. This world was in the midst of change.
The future was still a fog.
Her gaze fell, passing through layer upon layer of red leaves, settling on the red-tiled rooftops and cook-smoke below: "After all, it is so beautiful here. For it to simply disappear would indeed be a great pity."
Gaia fell silent.
After a long moment, she let out a quiet sigh: "Bringing about your own destruction... you are right. I created a failing work. I cannot demand that you come and correct it for me. Do what you were going to do. Let fate belong to fate."
"Having too many children always leads to fighting," Lucita said, by way of easy consolation. "You gave them too many things to fight over. Human nature simply cannot withstand a test like that."
"Human nature?"
"Yes. Meaning, if they have the means to destroy the world, they will inevitably do so. It's only ever a question of when."
"Perhaps you are right."
Gaia grew thoughtful, and slowly fell quiet.
The red sun sank westward. A sudden gust of west wind swept through the mountains and forests, and the red leaves rustled and shivered.
Something stirred in Lucita. She reached out her hand and touched only the tail end of a passing westerly breeze.
She drew her hand back, as though waking from a dream, and looked toward the distant mountains in the west.
Those mountains lay faint and dim, like a smear of dark violet mist settled and still.
The divine presence had departed for now.
Lucita pulled her gaze back, rubbed her forehead, and made her way down the mountain path step by step.
By the time she reached the foot of the mountain, dusk was already close.
The evening of the harvest festival was lively and full. The square was crowded with moving shapes. The once-a-year outdoor stage performance was held here.
After dinner, the performance began.
This year, Javena the mayor had specially invited the most popular performing arts troupe from the merfolk, presenting a grand theatrical work that was classic among the merfolk but had rarely been staged on the continent: Beneath the Dove Tree.
The story told of a beautiful love story between a hardworking but poor mortal girl named Heather and a divine young man named Brook, son of the water deity (the troupe, for the sake of appropriateness, had changed the time to the golden autumn season and the water deity to the land deity of harvest), set in a certain midsummer.
The girl Heather, through her virtuous character, drew the heart of Brook, the son of the harvest deity, who fell quietly in love with her from afar. He secretly came down to the mortal world, helped Heather with her household tasks without her knowing, and stole away gold, pearls, and gems from his mother to bring her.
This was swiftly noticed by the clever Heather, who was immediately captivated by Brook's beauty, accepted this radiant divine youth at once, and the two fell in love.
With Brook's help, Heather's practice of the magical arts went very smoothly, and she rose to become the most powerful warrior in her city.
But the good days did not last.
Before Brook had come down to the mortal world, his astonishing beauty had already attracted the long-harbored love of the god of war.
The god of war, discovering that Brook had fallen for another, flew into a rage and shot Brook dead with a bow and arrow.
Where Brook fell, a dove tree later grew. Every blooming season, the dove tree filled with snow-white dove blossoms, representing Brook's steadfast virtue in choosing death over surrendering the freedom to love.
Heather, devastated by her beloved's death, trained her magic arts with desperate intensity, and ultimately, in a mortal body, defeated the three guardians of the divine mountain and stood before the god of war, forcing the guilty deity to apologize. With the help of the creator god Gaia, the god of war surrendered one of her three golden arrows to help revive Brook.
Heather, through her courage, also earned Gaia's praise and the recognition and blessing of the harvest deity.
From then on, Heather's fields bore full ears of wheat every year, and she and Brook lived happily ever after.
A satisfying and harmonious conclusion.
The story, it was said, had originally come from prehistoric humanity, but with human dramatic and poetic traditions now fragmented and broken, the version most completely preserved was with the merfolk.
Beneath the Dove Tree, as a classic love song, had endured without ever fading, for its praise of the virtues of diligence and courage, and the simple human longing for a good life.
The crowd danced and sang. The music amplified through the natural resonance of the hollow sky-wood, filling every corner of the square. Children ran about everywhere holding small orange lantern lights that bobbed like scattered stars.
Lucita's attention, however, was on the mythology.
She asked Durani: "In the human mythological tradition, are there other divine beings besides the creator god Gaia?"
"Those humans love to make things up. They've invented a whole set of subordinate deities under the divine." Durani was rather contemptuous on the subject. "Understandable, I suppose. They've never encountered the divine directly, so they imagine things out of ignorance."
Lucita nodded.
It seemed that in the human world, the loss of magic had been going on for several ages, to the point where even their understanding of Gaia was this limited…
She cast a sideways glance at the singing on the high stage, picked up the wine jug from the long table, and sat down between Mavis and Violet: "The rest of this year's grape wine, shall we drink it?"
Mavis was the first to hold out her cup.
Lucita turned to meet her eyes and saw that a soft, unfocused mist had already risen in them, tinged faintly with red.
She paused, then poured her half a cup anyway, and looked back at Violet, raising an eyebrow: Is she drunk?
Violet shrugged.
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