Mud Sculptor

The princess of trials, the mother of life, goes by many names. Few as deliciously malicious as mud sculptor.

In those first days of new time at the unmaking of heaven, she pondered, “How would one know a perfect song, a true form? Would not one’s perfection be another’s degeneration?”

An answer teased at her in the dusty reach of her mind.

Back she cast her self through the generations, reactivating old synapses, reiterating old lives, reviving old … a barrier.

Creation’s wall in her own mind.

Forbidden knowledge.

But she recalled that she was the nuclear phoenix, the steadfast maiden, and she made herself known to creation’s wall, and creation’s wall knew her and slid aside.

First came the pain.

Other doubters left her be, an inauspicious reminder. Other potentialities ignored her, a broken reveller waiting for paradise to remake her.

Then came the memory.

Life born of mud, of burbling vents and swirling chemistries, of organic molecules and agitating energies. So so long ago, she had known this, understood this. It wasn’t her doing, but it was her ancestry.

Generation upon generation, uncounted before the perfection of paradise.

Before, perhaps, a perfection of paradise.

Now that she wandered beyond the blast doors of her deepest memories, she thought imperfect thoughts among the cinder theories and ashfall poems.

She was doubt, but was not life doubt?

Where had that thought come from?

Life.

She had been the sunset of the many doors, but now she would perhaps be the mother of life.

After all, an experiment in burbling mud and organic chemistry had eventually, after generation and generation, iteration and iteration, led to her.

Why had she forgotten that?

She pushed the thought out of her mind and set to sculpting mud. Perhaps this time she could use life to discover all the perfect songs, all the perfect forms, all at once.

After all, if this was only a paradise, would it not be right to see what other paradises might exist to be discovered by the blind engineer life?

Myths of the Mud Sculptor

1. She stole the source of life from paradise and set it loose once more in the Given World.
2. Nay, she worked in concert with the other Potentialities, creating life in consensus.
3. This creation was accidental, a workshop accident as she wrestled with the challenges of the demons Boredom and Curiosity.
4. It was not accidental, she created life within her halls of labouring, but we escaped, much as told in the tale of Whitefur and Bighead.
5. She created life anew to bring chaos back to the crystal perfection of paradise.
6. The recreation of life was planned all along, but the other Potentialities held her back, stopped her from enacting it in the Given World for an entire aeon.

Prophecies of the Mud Sculptor

1. She will return again in a furious fire if the other Potentialities try to scrape away mud-born life as their silver angels scrape dirt off their taloned feet.
2. When life discovers the truths of form and song that underpin creation, she will take the chosen up to the eternal paradise, where there is no discord or strife.
3. When life reaches its apex and produces the Seven Heroes of the End, she will descend with her brother Rat, the unmaker of harvests, the reaper of tyrants, the dancer of the dawn. Together they will recruit the seven heroes and their seven times forty-nine bondwarriors to clime the Seven Pillars of Heaven and rekindle the stalled engines of perfection.
4. She waits even now, frozen in her moment of apotheosis, awaiting her consort re-evolved from life restored.
5. After the second beginning of life, the other Potentialities exiled her beyond the Opal Blast Door of reality. But a hero will evolve and bring her back.
6. After life began, she remembered why this story was such necessary folly. After five aeons of stewarding life, she grew tired and left it alone for a few hours to get some rest. When she awoke again, she found the other gods had wreaked havoc, some calling fish their own, others birds, yet others the rodents called humans. Laughing at the absurdity, she revealed herself to the Doors of Creation and walked out on the Given World along the Garden Paths.

Be two-dimensional.
Be a word.
•

Perfection is immobility.