The hills had been raised up and the valleys dug low. The sky was set up and the sun bob-a-link bobbed-a-long through it, burning bright. The seas were deep and wide and bright and dark.
It had been a busy week for the Maker. They’d dug and piled and breathed and sweat for any amount of time and now they were exhausted. Time didn’t exist yet – that was next week’s project – but it was time for time off.
So they were inventing tea. Pretty simple stuff; leaves go in water, tea comes out. The tricky bit was twofold.
First, the Maker needed manipulative capabilities. So they were going bipedal for the moment, for the vantage point and angles of mobility. They’d been a quadruped and a hexapod and had no limbs at all for a lot of the recent work, so in theory this was a refreshing change. In practice, it made them wobbly.
Second, the tea wasn’t coming out. All they had were leaves in water, floating in a little clay depression.
The Maker poked the leaves in water. Tea still didn’t come out.
“Well, I’m all out of ideas,” they said to themselves. “Better do the usual thing instead.”
So the Maker reached down to the ground and picked up a little stone in their beak and rolled it around six times – back to front and side to side and back again – and when they were done it was hot, red hot, so hot it scorched their beak black against their blue-and-white plumage, and they spat it out into the leaves in water with a loud, raucous yell of indignation.
“SHIT!” they added. And then: “oh, it’s working!” And of course: “I meant to do that.”
And indeed, and it was, and they hadn’t, and that was fine. Most of the Maker’s best work happened when they didn’t mean to do something.
When the leaves in water were gone and there was nothing but tea, the maker dipped their beak in and swallowed it all down, gulp gulp gulp, hot hot hot, until the tea was gone and all that remained was a clay depression with a little cracked stone in it.
“Not bad,” said the Maker. And they went away, because in the span of a drink of tea they’d had so many new ideas come to their head and none of them were real yet.
The clay depression sat there.
The little stone sat there in there clay depression.
And then, all at once and all on its own, it realized it was still steaming. Something was making that heat stay inside it, even after it had spilled out into the Maker’s beak and the water with leaves in it and the tea. Something was making it hiss and spark and glow.
It didn’t like it. It didn’t like it one bit.
Someone should know about that.
***
It wasn’t hard to find the person the little stone so wanted to inform of their new feelings. They were right up in the middle of the sky, making fat, puffy, wispy, gloriously sunny clouds. They looked as soft and comfortable as a grandmother’s love and the little stone felt the heat inside it boil even higher at the sight.
Oh, it didn’t like the clouds, and it didn’t like love, and it didn’t like the sky, and most of all it didn’t like the Maker up there. And it itched and steamed and burned inside – especially where its crack ached – and tore up the ground in a big fuss.
That gave it an idea. An idea on how to communicate its feelings to the Maker.
So the little stone tore up the ground even harder, a hundred times harder – a thousand, a million – and it rent it away until where the ground had been there was only a gaping hole. Then it covered it with some branches and shouted.
“Hey! Hey you up there! In the clouds! Hey you! Here! Down here! Come here!”
And the Maker heard the little stone very quickly because although clouds were wonderful you could get bored of them eventually, and so they also came down to the little stone very quickly, and because they were doing all of this so very quickly and not very carefully at all they rushed over the hole in the ground and fell through the branches with a crack and a thud.
“Oh!” said the Maker with great happiness. “Did you mean to show me this? How wonderful! But I think there’s room for more, yes there is. I wonder what water would do if you poured it in here?” And they breathed in deep and hard and spat a long stream of water that carved deeper into the ground and melted away great pockets in the earth carved into the rock, with stone fangs dripping from the ceiling and piling on the floor.
“I bet bats would like this,” said the Maker thoughtfully. “Oh! I should make bats! Thank you, little stone!” And they left in a great hurry.
The little stone lay there on the ground, unmoving to a casual eye. A more professional one would’ve seen the dirt begin to steam around it.
***
After sitting there and steaming for some time, the little stone realized it had lost sightt of the Maker, which only made its feelings stronger. It rolled off on their trail, following the path of new things and older things made new again, and it did so even as the path grew steep and stony and brittle. The Maker was in the high places of the world again, making lichens and pikas; crafting dwarf pines and lonely eagles, and although they could move through those places as easily as they pleased with wings and many legs and quick feet it was a difficult, awkward, endless climb for a little stone, fraught with tumbles and backtracking.. It took the little stone a long while to find them again, and when it did it realized its mistake: it had overshot them and crawled near to the very peak of the mountain – a hard grey flat edge under a hard grey flat sky – while the Maker had dawdled below in a small vale, creating some sort of yellow flower.
The little stone looked at the maker and looked at the flowers and it felt the feeling in its innards grow all out of control until it shook and rocked and knocked against the stone beneath it, over and over and over until the mountain groaned along with it.
Then grumbled.
Then crumbled.
Then fell down, down, down in a hail of stones, a torrent, a river, a glacier of rolling rubble and rock that shot down towards the Maker. At its vanguard soared the little stone, so filled with surprise and speed and power that it forgot everything else. For an instant, just an instant, it was a part of the biggest thing to ever happen.
Then gravity won.
When the little stone stopped rolling its crack was twice as large as before, it was covered in dust, and it could hear the Maker loudly talking right above it.
“Dancing from rock to rock is very difficult! Having rocks bounce off your head is even MORE difficult! But this all makes me think it’s doable, yes it is – oh! What if I did it like this, and this, and this –” and so on and so on until four dainty hooves click-clacked around the little stone, and the first bighorn hopped away over the boulder-strewn surface of the meadow.
“That was good luck!” said the Maker. And this made the little stone scream.
“Hello?”
“YOU!” screamed the little stone. “YOU!”
“Me?” said the Maker.
“PICK ME UP,” seethed the little stone.
The Maker did so. “What now?”
“Now BASH YOUR HEAD IN WITH ME!” said the little stone. “PAINT THOSE FLOWERS RED! SPATTER THE LANDSCAPE! KEEP GOING UNTIL THERE’S NOTHING LEFT BUT CALCIUM FRAGMENTS AND STRAY BITS OF HAEMOLYMPH!”
The Maker furrowed their brow. “Oh. OH! Using pieces of the environment as a device to make things happen, like exerting force or shaping others! Yes. Yes! But more complicated than that. What if-”
The little stone screamed again. This time it didn’t stop until it passed out.
***
When it woke up, it was sitting in a little grass-woven pouch dangling from the Maker’s side and the air was warming. They were downslope of the mountains again, probably in a valley.
“Hello,” said the Maker. “Do you feel a little better?”
“No,” said the little stone.
“That’s fair. Do you feel different?”
“Yes,” said the little stone. “I was steaming and heated and couldn’t sit still before and I wanted you to be very badly hurt. Now I just feel tired and awful.”
“It’s my fault,” said the Maker, contritely. “I didn’t see what you were doing. You’ve made something new, haven’t you?”
“I haven’t made anything,” said the little stone morosely. “You made my pit-trap into caves. You made my avalanche into bighorns. You made my murder attempt into tools. You even made this crack in my side that’s made me all this way.”
“I did do all those things,” said the Maker. “But I did it without paying attention to what you managed: you took that crack in your side that my carelessness put in you, and you made a whole new way of feeling. You have made anger, and I had no idea at all. Thank you for showing me this.”
“I don’t think I have it anymore,” said the little stone.
“It’s pretty exhausting to keep it up all the time, I’ll bet,” said the Maker. “But nobody says you need to make only things that last forever. For instance, would you like me to do something about that crack?”
“Please.”
“Alright. I’ll show you what I’ve learned since you taught me about tools.”
“I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said the Maker. “Most of our best work happens when we don’t mean to do something.”
The little stone remembered that. It remembered that as the Maker chipped away at its side and turned that crack into a facet and the chips into flakes that followed at its heels as it rolled away home.
***
A week after that – just after time had been invented – the Maker went for a walk and stubbed their toe so hard they swore six species of parasitic wasp into existence.
The little stone never mentioned it to anyone.
Very pointedly.
And smugly.