One day the earth stood up. The ground rumbled and vast cracks formed around the slew of villages that made up the forgotten valley of the continent. Pinned between two perfectly nourishing rivers the people barely had made the time to acknowledge each other, let alone prepared themselves for the sudden violence the ground threw upon them.

People flooded from their homes, casting gazes on the ground crumbling around the far edges of their home, and then up to the sky as if in waiting of answers. What greeted them was clouds, large voluminous, powdery white things, suddenly growing and descending upon them like wrath. But it wasn’t. It was they who were growing. It would be nearly a day before a man from the west village left and traveled to where their earth suddenly ended. When the man returned he did not offer them answers, at least not the ones they wanted. He offered them mythology, stories that bore not even the lightest of questioning. He simply repeated himself, hoping that eventually they would understand him. He said they were floating now. And not just them, but all five villages, held up by massive moving boulders that walked on earth unfamiliar to him. He said that sitting in the clouds was the rock-born face of a great wolf, and it sat like a mountain ahead of the southern village. He said that its breath had scattered clouds like dust and the rivers still flowed from somewhere in the valley.

They laughed at him, chided him. Two nights the village bickered on how to believe the man who had offered them such unbelieved tales. The man didn’t care, he continued to roam the village telling and retelling the children of what he had seen. The adults did not, could not believe him, but mostly they argued among themselves, This was not the way things were. It was not and could not be the way things were. But it was. Its name was Nature, it had been asleep for a very long time, and he was very hungry.