The Totality of Decimation Morgan “Snowy” Deville ‘22 A storm raged among the children of the heavens. The forest glittered with the broken promises of the goddess that created it. Her tears fell smoothly from the mottled sky, shimmering in the darkness with a weak, shuddering silver glow. I sat beneath the trees, dark behemoths stretching towards the firmament in a desperate attempt to reach their weeping mother. Her many eyes twinkled down at them, constant and distant as they hung limply in the murky darkness that made up the goddess’ body, an image of Argus in her visage. I remained unnoticed, insignificant, and irrelevant as an ant to an eagle. Creatures skittered around me, somehow even less meaningful in the dynamic of creation as myself, hidden in the mist that engulfed the floor of this great wood. Titters crackled in the air like the crunch of autumn leaves, of the soothing sound of a campfire in the dead of winter, filling the forest with sounds of all that had come to accept the children of the goddess as their home. The children ignored the leeches that rustled around their feet. They fought each other, fought themselves, constantly drawing life up, up from the dirt and forcing themselves to grow higher and higher, each attempt reminiscent of the humans building the tower of babel to reach a God that wouldn’t listen. The goddess smiled at them, cold and malicious, sharpened like the edge of an obsidian blade. She relished in their misery, watching with unforgiving eyes and a merciless snarl.
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My eyes flickered down to the marbled stone that had become my legs, overgrown with fungus and decay. I smiled slightly at the gruesome sight, watching with little more than nonchalant interest as a furred creature began to gnaw veraciously at my thigh. I made no move to stop it, unconcerned with such a trivial thing. My head moved slowly, the creeping moss growing up my calcified form making movement nigh impossible past a certain point. Cold impermeable dredges pelted down on the earth, roiling above the forest like a torrential sea. Clawed hands reached down from the speckled sky, flickering and writhing in a shock of bright energy. The blow tore a hole in the body of one of the goddess’ children, and with a booming scream, the forest was set brilliantly ablaze. The creatures scattered, the thundering bellows of the sky deafening as the roar of the forest grew higher and higher in pitch. I stared upwards, entranced by the swirling mass of energy swallowing the rancid corpses of the oaken dead. Voices rang around me, rising and falling in the cacophony of the chaos overtaking the foliage. I felt panic begin to rise in my chest, but I remained unmoving in the face of imminent destruction. I had waited in this wood far too long to let such cosmic anger scare me away. Destruction reigned over the offspring of the goddess, and I watched passively as the inferno passed over my leaden form. Fragmentation threatened to destroy the last clinging shred of my sanity as a jovial laugh bub-
