PRE-BEQANNA:

For millions of years he sat undisturbed. He uplifted and he eroded.

He lived in a spine, with his brothers, as long as the Great Blank Continent itself, splitting it into two, jagged halves. On one side he cast a mighty rain shadow and the lands to his lee were drier than to his windward, where the prevailing winds brought bounties of moisture.

He made lands grow lush; he made lands grow sparse.
He did so quietly and undisturbed, for millions of years.

Industrious rodents, mottle-feathered birds and quick-footed goats made homes on his shoulders. Men, too, lived there. They settled down and built their villages—brightly coloured homes of timber and the things they could trade with his brothers’ people. They made their families and they tamed the animals—they dug picks into his flesh and carved weapons from the harvest.

He did not love them or hate them.
He simply was and they simply were.

‘Move, Hoarfrost.’
He had no legs then, of course, so when he was summoned he could only quake.
Awaken!’
He shook and threw great sheets of snow down his slopes, ripping ancient trees from their roots; he shook loose the animals from their homes—eggs from their nests and woolen cats from their caves. (Innocent casualties—he feels sorry for them, now that he can.) The villages were buried in his avalanches—men, women and children, all. He moaned and cracked as his bones, those made of stone and ice, fractured and pulled apart from each other.

The agony stretched on for days. Weeks, perhaps.
His brothers watched silently and uncaring;
his brothers’ people celebrated or wept (depending) when they heard the news.


From the rubble and the snow, he emerged, scarred and heavy-hearted. Fleshed and blooded—his skin was wet (and he could feel it, too, down to his bones… those made of collagen) and his hair (black and rough) was long and dirty. “Why?” he asked, with his new voice. It sounded many-tongued—like a thousand voices whispered into a northern wind, captured and caught in his throat. Low, vaporous and sad.

‘Your people were trouble makers, Hoarfrost. They had been warned… But, you were so a part of them that you had to go, too. This is the body I have given you to live in, now.’ It did not sound sorry, the Great God. But it was, in a way.

He nodded, slow and solemn. For the first and last time, he looked upon his brothers.

How mighty they were.