The Druid

Snow no longer fell. All the snow that ever could be had lain under the endless night sky for years. A solitude without compare, only accompanied by the distant stars and their insistence of light.

And the Druid marched on.

Frail legs, covered in petrified fragments of wood, carried the Druid across the infinite seas of snow. The prints covered the earth, a vast web in pursuit of this final task. A task now more ancient than time, only needed when the world had died, and gone cold and dark. Once complete, finally, the Druid could rest.

So the Druid marched on.

The snow covering the world was immaculate, and nothing save the Druid remained above the satin surface. Sometimes the Druid marched above a great tree or mountain, and they would share words in those brief moments. Often they spoke in lament of what the world had become before it died under unceasing snow. A victim of animal ambition, greed, and the machinery they devised to fulfill their horrid desires, taking the world as a slave, until it had little to give but poison and blood.

In the course of the Druid's march, there were few thoughts. Only a task that would begin the world anew, and see light, and warmth, and life, and in due time, finally, love within that life. As it had happened many times before, so it would again.

The Druid knew that when life and love came again, those two things so intertwined like the fundamental core of life itself, they would bring with them violence as well. Envy, hatred, cupidity, and other blights would turn to aggression as they always had before.

But the Druid marched on.

The Druid set a foot down. Then paused.

Could it be?

The Druid moved the trembling foot back and looked at the imprint. Something new. Just right of the center.

A minuscule, flat, shimmering leaf of green. A thin, stubborn, rough branch of brown.

The world had found its new life, here in this small specimen of flora. It would grow to become the first great tree of the world's new life in only a few years, and it would be where animals gather once the snow and ice released their hold on them. In some time after, perhaps some hundred thousand or some few million years, the world would die again. And another Druid would undertake the same task to find the next life of the world.

But for that to happen, this Druid must complete their task.

The Druid knelt down for the first time since the undertaking began, one knee settling to the right of the sprout, the other to the left. The Druid took one long, final breath, to take in all the pain, the sorrow, the regrets, the joy, the triumph, the love, all the ambient emotion of the dead world collected over the long march of centuries. The Druid held them all, and in the cold of the world, they crystallized within that weary soul into a prism, expanding and coalescing and consuming the Druid's body for itself until it formed a colossal crystalline egg of every color in every shade, sparkling in the starlight that all seemed to focus upon this new creation.

For some time, the egg simply was. It drank the light of the stars, taking in their warmth and reflecting the vibrant light all across the world. It drank the blood from the Druid's body and began constructing pathways for the body it would become. It drank the snow it stood upon, uncovering dead mountains, trees, artifacts from the civilizations that consumed the world - those, too, it took into itself, turning these things into fuel and material.

Then, the egg began to burn.

At first, it burned small, just an ember inside the goliath, recombinant collection of the history of the world. The blood of the Druid pumped through veins and arteries, carrying with it heat and fuel. The flame began to spread inside the egg, spreading faster as it grew. With its spread, everything the egg had drank began to burn - the light of stars, the feelings from the world, the remnants of life.

It all burned, and inside the egg, it all turned to ash.

As the heat grew, the outside of the egg changed color, going from a spattering of every color, then eclipsed by a dominance of red, then orange, yellow, white, and eventually, it glowed blue and bright. Blue it remained, a beacon of light in that eternal night of the world's death, until all inside it had become ash. Then the ash too began to burn, and the color of the egg began changing to fiery red. It glowed like a new sun, and the snow around the world began to melt.

All at once, as the egg glowed its brightest and radiated its warmth across the entire surface of the world, the egg's surface began to crack.

And then the egg shattered.

A wave of heat blasted across the world, melting all the snow that remained, the Druid's footprints only an ashen memory. The fresh water was full of all the egg had drank and burned. The starlight quickened saplings and seeds into trees and flora. The ambient emotions brought creatures and fauna to life. The remains of they who killed the world raised mountains and deepened oceans. Again, there was wind and storms, fire and ice, water and earth, love and hate, life and death.

Where the Druid had died, the sapling it found grew into a tree taller than the mountains, a canopy wide and deep as any ocean. Creatures of fur, of skin, of hair, of bone, of down, of scales, of shell, of blood, all began their way to this first great tree, crossing forest and jungle and swamp and sea.

The world lived again.

From the egg burst a great Phoenix, climbing through the sky on wings burning brilliant red and wider than the great trees. Rising, rising, above mountains, above the great trees, above the dominion of storms, that herald of a new world soared again. The stellar flames of its body, amalgamations of countless stars, gave birth to daylight and shadow, summer blaze and winter chill, and colors uncountable. Crimson wings brought wind and coalesced water into clouds dark as the Druid's endless night. Gusts from the ascent of those Phoenix wings scattered the clouds across the world as they deluged rain and snow, giving shape to new lakes, rivers, and glaciers.

The world breathed again under the Phoenix flight. It would one day die again, when the life gifted then thought itself deserving of the world.

They would take from the world to build their machines. They would starve the world to feed their avarice. They would kill the world to live alone in the darkness.

They, too, would die eventually. The world will turn to snow. A frozen monument to its own death.

Then the Druid will march. The Phoenix will soar.

The world will live again.