A droplet of crystal fluid drifted down the leaf. Catching it with her tongue, the striped bear forgot her station for a single second as sensation took her mind away. Theming smiled. Another success. Another delight of creation. The other gods would never taste the pleasure that his tiniest friends did every day. There was a faint whisper of a prayer in his ears, but he did not know whence it came.
Too much to do. Which made it all the more distressing that the very next moment, the striped bear was gone. As were all its cubs, its cave, the tree it sat on, the liquid it tasted, and the leaf the liquid fell down from.
Gone. But he was still there: Theming, most naive and now most distressed of all the gods. So he flapped the wings his current form allowed him to flap, and he set off, not quite realizing the gravity of the situation. For when he rose above the hill over which a lavish jungle had once spread itself, he saw that it wasn't just this hill, but every other hill, as far as the nearest star could illuminate. It was all gone.
A dark, langurous blue now wrapped itself over the moon he had named Tenglina. For a moment, Theming surmised that his precious Life had simply upped and left for a moment- some new reaction borne of the billions of tiny coincidences he had a habit of generating. But Life was fully his. While it couldn't quite be grouped under the banner of 'design', it sure emanated from him. Maybe it was his loneliness at first, or even boredom, worst of all afflictions the Gods suffer from. In any case, he knew it in his heart of hearts: this was not what Life was meant to do.
A violet raven swept by and fled to a distant moon, which, within minutes, also turned entirely blue.
And that was how Life was ripped from Tenglina, Theming's favorite. The ashes of legions of leaves swam through the bones of its forests and nestled deep into the soil. Skeletons of many a species Theming had blissfully smiled upon adorned the jungles with their solemn contorted shapes. A chiming sound rang faintly in the sky before the sound of finality, the silence of airless moons, a stunted whisper in the wind, stilled all upon Tenglina. And still, Theming did not listen to the silence around him. His newfound senses turned inward, overwhelmed, and deep in his heart, for the first time in his infinity of existence, he saw a black shape staring back. It smiled at his horror, and nestled deep into his bones. And as the blood of Theming started blackening and reeling from the poison, his soul begat a hole of knowledge so dark that the question of Why it all happened was etched into the very marrow of his current form.
There was a figure down below. A figure he had not made. As Theming slunk down upon the dark blue ashes feeling as if a thousand stars had crushed him, he shifted his beak and assumed the form of the striped bear he now missed so very much. Theming walked up to the shining blue figure, numb to his nerves, and he saw the inevitable. The figure had no face, no trace of any features, no expression, and no gaze- just a humongous gaping hole in its head. The stars in the icy sky of Tenglina shone right through it. And that, cold as the Edge, was the moment the God of Life shivered and trembled, for he knew not what stood before him.
Theming settled on two paws, peered, and wondered. Then he spoke.
"Are you responsible?", he asked weakly. The figure adjusted its posture towards Theming, and the God noticed that a subtle heat-like starlit hue shifted around the figure as it did so.
No response.
"Is there any way you might explain why my creations have been ripped off my moon?", he inferred, quite insistent this time. His sudden assertiveness subsided not long after. A thin, piercing, hollow sound flew at his starlit ears. The words were pronounced slowly, unevenly, yet extremely assured.
"You are of the living, and you do not understand. It is the business of Syndar, and you should be in his care as of this moment. You are not. What is your business? How do you defy the Gods?"
Theming had never been indignified before.
"I am the Gods. And your Syndar, whichever he is, is my subject. I made him, and while I am puzzled at your careless tinkering with vanishing acts, I demand you to put my Creation back into its rightful place AT ONCE!"
No response.
"WHERE IS MY LIFE?", Theming howled at the figure.
No response.
It is hard to argue with something that is not your creation.
Finally, the hollow moved. And it did something that, once again, seeped into the skin, crept inside the bones and chilled the bear-shaped God to the marrow. It picked up the skull of a bird, beheld it intently with its hollow face for all of two seconds, and threw it away. The carelessness was scandalous. Years of play, ages of affection, aeons of delight at granting eyes to the eyeless, having them stare back and fulfilling tiny little functions all around his favored forests. Ended. On top of the pile.
But what came next was worse. The figure moved on, and every step it took seemed to turn the ash-stricken ground a little bit more blue, a little colder, a little bit more like ice-charred rock. Then it nimbly hopped, floated through the air, and glided behind the blackened stump of a tree. Plowing through the ashes, the bear that was howling but a moment ago shuddered. It had found one of Theming's still-breathing favorites. And so the hollow, piercing voice surrounded the deafened ears of a dumbstruck God once more. "You have Spirit, but you won't. Be polished." And the six-armed badger, his fur no longer glowing fluorescent hues, scattered in the wind.
It was unbearable.
Trauma chimed around him like a crystal cave in an earthquake. And Theming sank into a deep and restless slumber as Tenglina was sorted, accounted for and catalogued by Little Blue Men that cared not for the demands of a God.
