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After the Bang, Night’s progeny went different ways.
Death settled with Mother. The two of them got on well, content to stay in evenings, have toast and tea for supper while wearing comfy slippers.
Feral Love swooped out into the playground of the new universe and started doing what Love does best which is to smash things together until they ignite, then see what pops out.
Love’s handiwork: “Multi-colored haze marks the site of two colliding galaxy clusters.” ESA/Hubble image
Love pummeled random gaseous dust clouds until they collapsed into burning stars. The insides of their fiery bellies served as furnaces for transmuting raw particles into elements. So did the building blocks of form emerge. Love kept on smashing and igniting, indiscriminately, delighting in random accidents and unintended consequences — planets, moons, icy-tailed comets, lumpy meteoroids, planetesimal debris, plasma bubbles.
Such a lot of buzzing, spinning organized objects stressed Auntie Enty something awful. But worse was to come. Love’s astonishing revenge, Love’s break-through moment, irrupted quite unintentionally and long after everyone had lost count of how many celestial forms had emerged over how many billion years. One day, unnoticed, a teeny-tiny bit of matter self-organized and self-smashed and self-replicated. Life happened.
Life happened, and once Life came alive, Death got a job.
Oh, how Death got a job! It became a career, an all-consuming workaholic obsession. No more nodding off at Mother’s supper table. Death tumbled to the macabre dance we know so well, dashing to and fro, up and down, killing off Love’s products at a manic, chaotic pace, yet never able to snuff out Life.
Love, disdainful and dismissive but sore as Hell, shouted at Death, roared sounds at Death, insulted Death with flibbertigibbet, with frateretto, with hoberdidance, with tocobatto. So full of fury were Love’s invented words that they spun off and consolidated into dancing devils.
So much for fusty old Primal stories. What about the now?