When the Earth was young and the Garden had yet to be planted by the hand of God, it is said that the world was but a mass of gleaming metals, a sidereal crystal that glimmered to the void in gold and silver and copper and iron and mercury, an undifferentiated swirl of hard opaque jewels and dies and billets and ingots, rough and ready but without the assessor to praise them, the mortal maker to mold and form them in that dawn smithy of the world. But deep within the Earth already from the first her ravening had begun, a firebound fever that rose up in heat and flame and spread by and by to the whole of her body, and soon she melted and consumed herself; and the crystals upon her plashed into a sea, early the quicksilver, and then the gold and the silver and the copper, and finally a lake of iron rose up lapping at the boiling surface of the world and consumed all her brilliancy and all the erstwhile glory of her gleaming surface, quickening it to a drab amalgam and finally dragging it down into the dark womb far below, where neither eye nor hand could ever alight. And these treasures would be guarded jealously by the Earth and would slowly, over the course of mere aeons, form the very core of her, that only fools and the ignorant would proclaim that the heart of the world were rotten or the pith of it corrupt. And then the crust was closed about that crucible with a magma of angry igneous worms that at last annealed scab-like into a frozen silica sea and a waste of dun basalt scoria. And the Earth became to all seeming but a block of slag loosed upon the cosmos, worthless to sight, and no least trace left upon her of those riches which she had once in the ostentation of her youth boasted to the view of all.
And so she would have remained had God not bestowed upon her the tears of heaven.
Was a star not distant and hard upon the limits of his inner growth, which had been as a forge or forgery of light, tumbling his elements in infernal furnaces. But he in his rude matter had exhausted all possibility, and so rendering a final accounting he drew himself up to a mass immense and immeasurable, until the very greatness of him and the power he had spent recoiled down into himself and he twisted inward in a final transgression. Then he rose mightily before all of Creation in such a blaze of light and heat as could not be abided by the eyes of any but the God that had fashioned him. In an instant the stuff of him was transfigured and the great alchemy consummated, that from the mere iron and silicon and carbon of his being should be wrought gold and silver and diamond. And this wealth he cast out from him in the boon of his fatal glory, and strew these jewels like a bounty upon all of being.
Long did they travel, spiraling in the empty reaches of space, before a cloud of them at last encountered the Earth, and flung down in plummeting arcs upon the face of her for long days, penetrating her surface, adorning her once more with a sky-wrought wealth—an affluence to be sure inferior to that which she had once squandered, but great beyond compare to any mortal reckoning. And she clasped these sky gems and empyreal metals in her hide, and so bejeweled, progressed upon her courses.
Far later, after the Garden had been vacated, when the land had been formed by the cast of time and the will of Heaven, and the mountains risen up sharp upon the seams of the Earth’s raiments, and the waters been pressed jewel-like to swirl alluring about her and to become the forcing beds of her life, and she had come to her maturity and the features of her had hardened and the course of her destiny been tracked, and life itself been brought forth upon her in all its multifarious and irrevocable forms, then the mountains grew sate and vomited up their treasures, spewing them upon the valleys and the plains, so that once more the Earth should glimmer to sight and her wealth be worn proudly upon her clay skin and her verdant robes. And much did she hold still beneath the garments of her modesty, but much as well revealed, indifferent though it were to the dumb beasts of the soil; until that strangest being, the exile called man, stumbled upon these things, and in the fogs of his halfsight sank upon his haunches and plucked them up and wondered that there should be such crystals as would harden blood and ichor and sky and skyfire, such ores as might capture the essence of sun and moon. And man enraptured drew them out and worked them with his own and lesser craft, and made a cult of these jewels as the first products of the foundry of the gods, before finally making a fetish of them in his own decline and heathenry. But always the worth of them would burn distantly to his mind, for not save in his final immolation can man ever altogether forget the higher forge from which he derives his being, nor fail to perceive, if only through a glass and darkly, the earthly analogues for his own first cradle and final potential.
Thus taking in hand this metal he would call it the breath of the gods, or sky metal, dimly aware of its origin, and would adorn his palaces and his temples with it, and lay it upon the holy and high things of his existence, and thus ennoble them in both appearance and being, until such a day as he in his swelling corruption knew nothing better for these things than to cling to them in avarice or trade them for the trivial and the perishable. And thus gold and silver, first produce of a starforge, would pass from framing man’s thrones and gilding his icons to adorning his armors and arms, descending thence to the stuff of his jewelry and his coin and finally to a mere commodity, to be stocked in dank warehouses and fortresses for the day his falsified currencies should fail him.
But so it is with man, that often he must sink to rise, and even in his adulteration and pollution points back ever to that portion of himself which glimmers through all his debasement. For though he has long forgotten the path to ascend from symbol to truth, from analogy to origin, from type to archetype, yet even in his dregs the sky follows him down.
And thus it was in a fallen age upon a lonely continent where man had until lately been but a wandering presence that there came unbidden newcomers, pioneers cutting hard into unnamed lands; and they, stumbling upon these obscure leavings of an unknown cosmic drama, would sink to the ground upon their knees in a gesture of reverence which a man once reserved to kings and gods, and in the absence of all right pride and upright cleanliness would worship the yellow and white metals themselves that they clutched up there out of the river beds and the crags of the mountains. And they would cleave into the Earth in avid search of the same, toward what end not even they could tell, but as if the activity had been an end in and of itself and all their lives justified in that mere feat of gleaning and hording—as if come Judgement Day their souls would be lain on a balance side by side with the riches that they had plundered from the dark soil, and by this measure alone the elect would be winnowed from the damned.
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Fearless description, bordering on insane… loved it!
"...yet even in his dregs the sky follows him down"
hel yes.