and lord, I fashion dark gods too; all

[Pollock]

(—the sick god said let there be a valley…)

He can only suppose the god likes desolation.

(Space, they say – a lord of mouthless planets and sterile constellations.)

He can understand the appeal. This badland is not ugly. She is twisted and diseased (she is unadorned; he can fix that) but there is a poetry and an art about her. The gift-giver cannot pretend he does not bend towards the more spirited. After all, he grew up in fecund woodlands – steely pines and bone-white birches – loamy and damp, he dressed them with his things (like jewels on earthen crowns) and fed them.

And then his Forest had become sour, unhappy without his pretty offerings.

She took his things, broke down the organic material that had made them them (the oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, leeched away and softening them). She took and laid waste to them all, leaving teeth, like shrapnel, behind.

So he had sought a better forest.

A flowering, whispering, gravid kingdom. He found towering redwoods, rough-hewn and ancient, so newly vacated. Still, bodies clung to it – a handful of hips and lips; some fat with child... their world had been a small one (even smaller now). Sharp-tongued shrews and meek squaws, the disciple had left them behind like sitting ducks – and her, that feast! Red and white, a woman now.

Those trees had been Her seed and sprout.

“Pollock,” he says, and he is one of them – his ‘Ungratefuls’, but is it ever healthy to feel completely gratified? 

Somewhere is Bruise (his child – the first to come to him, milk-needy and colt-footed, with no mother in tow) and Sinew (though she is not his – only an errant, wild ambition).

(Build. And had he not told her it was so?)

He is good at building. 

He had made a magnum opus – a violent, gothic thing – out of mud and snow, once.

----

I like The Wasteland too, Pangea also awesome. I have, through my very random name finding methods, rustled up:
- hamarr (old norse word for crag)
- erövra/erovra (a swedish word, means capture/take/conquer)
- ödemark/ødemark/odemark (swedish/danish word for wasteland/wilderness/wild)
- stelen (dutch word for steal.. is a verb but whatever... looks nice lol)
- runnella (finnish word meaning ravage/maim/mangle/you get it)
- bevara (swedish word meaning preserve/maintain/conserve/keep/protect.. works in a couple ways i guess)
- videvik (estonian), hämärä/hamara (finnish), sumrak (bosnian) - all mean dusk
- ortus (latin for sunrise... maybe too bitchy?)
- eremus (latin for wasteland/wilderness/desert... which the wasteland kind of half qualifies as)
- valles (latin for valley, maybe too close to olden days.. not fresh enough)

okay, I'm done. I could literally do this all night given how many languages and words exist.
Of the ones I found, I would narrow down to Hamarr, Videvik, Valles and Eremus myself, I guess. Still, totally cool with whatever xD