In the dawn of ages, beyond the beyond; amidst a finitesimal space where auroras streaked the void of darkness, several bodies hovered, weightless in the atmosphere. Each of these spherical figures made up the Eight Houses: Mercurious, Venustia, Marsupan, Jupitite, Saturna, Uranusy, Neptunid and Plutox. The woman who governed them was named Universe, goddess of chaos and mystery in the cosmos. Her beauty was pure bliss to gaze upon, as her hair expanded and curled into an unfathomable abundance, reaching millenniums ahead of time and existence; her flesh shone with the milky brilliance of polished china and in the center of her face a single intricate starburst beamed—the Sun.
Centuries passed as Universe spent relentless hours molding and shaping each of the Eight Houses, one by one. She arranged shards of meteorite and galactic debris layers upon layers to compose the bodies that presently rotated around her. As the years came slowly and left no faster, her patience eroded away and she finally noticed a flaw in her self-created realm. As the only goddess in spirit, she loomed idol over these bodies, and yet not-a-one of them knelt to bow and worship her glorious omnipotence. Dishonored and enraged by their indifference to praise, Universe, goddess of chaos and mystery in the cosmos pulled forth her arms through the vast, cloaking sleeves of the galaxy and unleashed a Supernova that spanned across her lair. Explosive radiation illuminated the air over and around the houses, surging past every square inch of space imaginable. Then, the nuclear fusion of shock waves began to amp- up all surrounding gravitational energy, producing an inverted black hole of solid, tightly compacted fragments.
As her anger cooled, Universe looked upon this inadvertent creation with wonder. Feeling creative and inspired, the goddess spun this formation around on her finger and decided that this globe would be the newest neighbor to the Eight Houses. She would call it Earth and design it specifically as a civilized dwelling peopled by beings known as humans. These creatures would live in total devotion to her greatness and would reproduce so that generations after the initial population may grow to appreciate and adore the almighty of the goddess Universe.
With her blueprints in tow, she painstakingly fabricated the Earth, beginning with the tides of the great oceans and their connecting shores upon the seven main elevated land masses. Advancing inward, she pinched and poked the surface with two fingers, shaping the world into various mountain peaks, forests and valleys. With her canvas prepared before her, she added details to the separated lands; distinguishable characteristics from deserts to rivers to identify each part of the aqua-emerald globe: unique homes for all of her subjects to thrive in.
Excitement crinkled the brow of the Universe with intense concentration, and within a single spin of its axis, her world was complete. The shallow streams bubbled blue with the current, and vegetation bloomed on all corners of the territory. The people had been crafted into upright individuals, each having faces, necks and two upper and lower appendages held together with a connecting torso, cloaked with different shades of outer membrane to hide and protect their inner mechanisms. The supply of population had grown to require groupings of her subjects to live on different lands: some were placed in the east, others in the west, and the rest were sent to live at the top or bottom of the colorful sphere.
Days passed, and the goddess could not have been happier to see everyone communicating and cooperating in the environmental system she produced in such a short time. However, after a week of observation, Universe’s smile faded into a deepening frown as she noticed that the humans were falling to the ground and would not get up. Scooping up a handful of the collapsed people into her palm, she held them close to her eye and took-in her careless mistakes all at once: their bones were showing through the flesh that had been sun-burned raw and red, and the few that were still slightly conscious were choking on dry, pink tongues.
The horrific scene unfolding before her was tragic, but an idea struck and she began to act swiftly. New creatures—animals of various sorts-- were molded into the landscape accordingly, along with wooden structures to shelter the humans. Next, Universe inhaled a breath of the cosmos into her body and blew out the wind across earth’s atmosphere, hurling clouds filled with life bringing chemicals over every inch of soil and sea. Finally, after frantic deliberation of the last installment, Universe decided upon a way to divide the day into resting and working periods. She pulled her eye, the Sun, down shut, and revealed a bleak and cratered eye-lid which became known as the Moon. The shade cast a long rolling shadow around the globe cooling the surface and bearing small, enchanting twinkles far into the sky. In a matter of moments the people woke up and moved into their shelters, inhaling the fresh winds and consuming the game of fish, deer, and cattle. That was the first day and night.
The following morning, Universe rattled her people awake in eager anticipation, forcing them to come out of their homes. Hands shaded squinted eyes as they looked up at her in grogginess. Hours passed as the people simply stood and stared at the sky in confusion, expecting something to occur. The goddess of chaos and mystery in the cosmos began to frown, drumming her fingers upon her pale thigh waiting for them to do what she had created them to do: engage in worship to honor her greatness. When no one moved, Universe’s impatience morphed from anger to blind fury as she bellowed in a thunderous roar:
“This is what my subjects do to thank me for all I have provided for them? When I saw that you were breathless, I sent you winds! When I saw that you were depleted of nutrients I bore you streams and live game! I’ve given shelter, foliage and maternal care. So how do you gaze up at my prominence and deny me praise, the worship that I’ve earned? The Eight Houses have witnessed my ferocity as result of their unwilling honor, and now my ungrateful people shall too feel my awesome wrath!”
With those words, the goddess of chaos and the mystery of the cosmos shook the ground beneath thousands of pairs of bare feet, and cracked the land masses in half, from mountain peak to valley. Soon, the throats within the mountain ranges opened up and projected boiling red fluids, that flowed swiftly across the soil and forests, singeing trees and burning terrorized flesh in its path. As the earth quaked and opened more and more, water rushed into the deepening gaps, displacing the great oceans and forming vicious tsunamis, waves that swallowed nearly half of Earth’s population in a single gulp. Before the people thought that nothing else could possibly distraught the land and seas, clouds of freezing temperatures cloaked the entire atmosphere and brought forth chunks of firm balls of snow, pitched directly at the wailing victims. This blizzard then gave way to dozens of swirling gusts of winds twisted and churned, growing in height and magnitude, picking up homes, cattle, and forest canopies one by one, and spewing them around the surface like unwanted, useless garbage—these were the first tornadoes.
Finally, the chaos settled and ceased. Clouds dissipated and the climate returned to a comfortable state. The globe no longer bore the appearance of the perfect world that once was. Only fourteen subjects remained—two per continent, one male and one female—cowering in the presence of the goddess .Trembling to their knees in respective instinct, they reached out their arms above their heads and bowed, murmuring phrases of sincere apology. Content with the result of her natural disasters, Universe, goddess of chaos and mystery in the cosmos felt that her people had forever learned to give her a fair amount of daily worship of praise and would always honor the greatest lesson of their experience: to appreciate all things provided and leave nothing taken for granted.