Young Writers Society

This is one of my first attempts at a short fiction and my first posts. Please respond with your thoughts, be it complement or criticism.

He had awoken to an Earth untouched by man, one of prairies green and water pure. The ground bellow him was his, the sky above him was his, and all the life around him was his. It was his duty, his responsibility, his pleasure to watch over it all. And watch he did, for hundreds of years he watched the small animals on the ground live in his loving shadow, and the trees grow to heights rivaling his waist. In all this, he claimed everything and took nothing, for unlike the beasts at his feet or the birds at his head, he had no want of food or need to mate; he was complete as he was.

But he was no mere beast of the field, nor bird of the sky. He possessed his mighty hands, with which his mind demanded creation. He no longer took joy in watching the beasts feed and the trees grow, and so he left them in favor of the mountains of rock that contained all he wanted. With practice, he learned to use stone against stone to chip away the hidden forms inside the rock. Many moons passed, far too many for him to count (and he cared not), before he had finished his first project. It was of his likeness, a giant whose slender frame rose over all things and whose hands of stone could scrape the heavens.

But it looked so lonely, his creation. So resuming his tools, he set to work carving out a familiar for the stone colossus. Moons upon moons rose and fell over him as he worked without rest to create another being of stone. This one had not the great height of its predecessor, but was broad shouldered and thickly built. In this ones hands he put a tool similar to one of his own, a great hammer before which all things must crumble. He reflected on his work and was glad. The two were a true pair, both opposite and complement of the other. He felt no love but for them, the pastures of the past forgotten entirely.

There lay an ocean of malleable rock before him; all he had to do was to take his tools to it. And so he did, and he who was once the guardian of life was now the creator of his own lifeless world. For centuries he toiled without pause, not in sun nor in rain did his hammer and chisel cease their rhythmic motions, stripping away stone as if it were never there. And when he had reached the limitless ocean on all fronts, he once again returned to his first two projects, the only two incarnates of him. They seemed so wrong, with their backs to an empty plain. So, using his chisel to free them from the ground, he hoisted both the colossal creations onto his shoulders and searched all his work for a place for them, his beloved brethren. Each found their place, one upon a platform overlooking a misty lake and the other guarding an elevated valley. But only to share this vast world? he wondered. And so he made fourteen more great creations, each one unique to its location. He drew inspiration from the birds that flew, the beasts that walked, the fish that swam and from his own self. The challenge of turning a creature of size nearly unnoticeable into a gargantuan statue fazed him not at all, for why would he hurry? Time had become meaningless to the eternal being that was him, but the Earth over which he presided grew centuries while he worked lovingly. And as the last bit of rock fell away from his final creation, he suddenly felt his arms grow unwieldy and his legs weaken. His need to create had subsided to a need, a physical need, to stop and rest. So that is what is he did, he lumbered away to the one unbroken mountain and slept for the first time in all his hundreds of years.