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EATER OF SUMMER
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This is the first page of the story I'm working on. This bit of garbage represents about twenty hours of my time.
Ages after the world had cooled, but still long, long ago, two continental plates came together. Force from this impact warped and rippled the smooth, sandy bed of a shallow sea. An eon of sustained stress shattered the ocean floor. The press continued, pushing the crushed earth upward; spikes and spires of fragmented strata thrust high into the atmosphere, as the bottom of the sea ascended to the top of the world. Water scurried and gushed over and down new made tracks and ruts, frothing, foaming, splashing, and trickling away, to some fresh made basin; transforming, becoming some new sea, the same old sea. On the mountaintops, wind and rain stripped and stole away the sand and the soft bone-rock underneath, leaving new made peaks of shining basalt, fresh and raw, against the sparkling, blue-black sky.
Unhindered, unabated, time pressed on; ages, and ages more, rose and dwindled. In the lapse, jagged peaks smoothed, rounded off, and, eventually, wasted away. Land lifted, land dropped. The sea returned.
Continents came together, moved apart. Mountains erected and eroded.
The sea returned.
And so on…
A goodly time after what was, perhaps, the tenth rotation of this cycle, men from the City of Relics came and built a rude structure of stone atop what had, not once, but many times, been the sea floor, or a mountain peak, or a patch of grassland, and was, now, the rounded top of a great hill.
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