Arrax left Veldanava to his work without a word.
It wasn't rude. It simply felt right, the way a man steps outside whilst another is reading, not out of disinterest but out of respect for concentration. Veldanava had that look about him now, the look of a man who had finally found the first thread and was pulling it carefully, afraid that too much speed might unravel the whole thing before it had even begun.
Arrax walked until Veldanava's light was behind him and the void ahead was completely his own.
He stopped.
He looked at his hands, pale and long fingered, the small purple wings behind him twitching idly as he thought. The Yorkshire pudding had not been planned. It had simply arrived because he wanted it. Because he remembered it. Because the wanting and the remembering had, in this place, the same weight as action.
'So what happens,' Arrax thought, 'if I want something larger.'
He pressed both palms downward.
The void beneath him cracked.
Not violently. Not with thunder or the drama he might have expected. It cracked the way old ice does, slowly and with a sound like held breath finally released, as the nothing beneath him gave way to something.
Colour bled upward first. Deep, arterial red, the kind that sits at the bottom of a wound before the air touches it. It spread in every direction as though it had always been there and only needed permission to show itself. The red thickened into ground, into plains that stretched without limit in every direction beneath a sky the colour of dried blood and dying ember.
Arrax lowered himself onto it.
The ground beneath his feet was warm. Not uncomfortably so, but present, alive in the way skin is alive. It gave slightly under his weight like wet sand packed just tight enough to hold.
He looked around.
The plain breathed.
That was the only word for it. The ground rose and fell in long, slow rhythms as below its surface something churned, and from the furthest reaches of the red horizon came the sound of movement. Vast and deep and constant, like the turning of something too large to see all at once.
Then it crested.
A wave. Not of water but of red ichor, thick and dark and gleaming, it rose at the horizon and rolled forward across the plain in a wall three hundred metres tall, consuming everything beneath it as it came. Arrax watched it approach without moving. As the wave broke over him, it passed through him like smoke, and where it receded it left the plain reshaped. Hills where flat ground had been. Channels carved deep into the red earth where the ichor ran in rivers, branching and joining and splitting again.
The plain was already changing itself.
Arrax crouched and pressed a hand into the ground.
'People,' he thought. 'A place like this needs people.'
He pulled his hand back slowly, and from the indent his palm had left, something rose.
It came up the way a plant comes, except that plants are patient and this was not. It straightened into the shape of a man in seconds, pulling the red ichor around itself like a coat being put on in a hurry, and where the coat settled, skin appeared. Black as ink, black as the space between stars, black that was not the absence of colour but the presence of all of them pressed so close together that none could be told apart.
Its eyes opened.
Red. Not blood red. Something older. Something that had been red before the word existed.
It looked at Arrax.
Arrax looked back.
The being tilted its head. Then its shape blurred at the edges, shimmering and shifting as it tried different arrangements of itself before settling back into the shape it had begun with, upright, tall, similar to a man in the way a shadow is similar to the thing casting it.
"Right," Arrax said. "Good."
He stood and pressed both hands into the ground this time.
They rose in dozens. Then hundreds. From every point of the plain where his thought reached, the black beings pulled themselves upright from the ichor, red eyed and silent and already curious, already moving, already testing the limits of the shapes they wore. Some stretched taller than they had been. Some flattened. Some split briefly into two before pulling back into one, as though the idea of being singular was something they had to remind themselves of.
But they kept the shape of men and women. Something in them understood instinctively that this was the boundary, not a rule imposed but a gravity obeyed.
Arrax watched them move across the plain in groups and alone, and felt something close to satisfaction before his attention moved upward.
He looked at the sky.
He thought about forests.
The first one arrived from below rather than above. The ground heaved as something enormous pushed upward through the ichor plain, a mass of dark wood and thick root, rising and rising until it stood on four legs each as wide as a castle wall, its body a mountain of bark and branch that scraped the red sky. On its back, an entire forest had grown, trees so tall their highest branches vanished into the cloud of blue haze that drifted around the creature's shoulders like a cloak it had been given and never asked for.
The blue light from the forest on its back fell across the plain in patches, and where it touched, the red ground cooled and quieted.
A second came up beside the first. Then a third further along the horizon.
The black celestials on the plain below stopped and looked up.
Then the nearest towering wooden beast lowered its head and the forests on its back swayed as it began to walk, each step shaking the ground for half a kilometre in every direction, the blue haze spreading ahead of it as it moved through the clusters of red eyed beings like weather moving through a valley.
The celestials scattered at first. Then the bolder ones stood their ground. Then the boldest ones charged.
A celestial leapt onto the nearest wooden giant's leg and began to climb. Others followed. Their black hands found holds in the bark, pulling themselves upward as the beast continued walking without acknowledgement, unbothered, as a cliff face is unbothered by the birds that nest in it.
Then the forest on the giant's back stirred.
Roots dropped from its underbelly and swept across the climbing celestials like a hand brushing dust from a table, sending black bodys tumbling back to the red plain below. The celestials hit the ground and reformed immediately, pulling themselves back together from the ichor they'd splashed into, red eyes already looking back up with something that had not been there before.
Arrax smiled.
'Good,' he thought. 'Fight.'
He stepped back and let the plain continue without his hands in it, watching as the towering wooden beasts moved in slow circuits whilst the celestials reformed tactics beneath them, testing and probing and being swept away and returning. The blue haze from the forests above thickened in some places and thinned in others as the beasts reacted to where the celestials pressed hardest.
It was already becoming something. Not chaos. Not order. Something between the two that was more interesting than either.
Arrax turned his attention briefly to the sky.
He thought about birds. Small things. Quick things. He thought about the ones he used to watch from office windows, sparrows mostly, too fast to look tired even when they probably were.
They arrived in flocks, red feathered and sharp beaked, circling the wooden giants and diving at the celestials in formations that served no obvious purpose until they found one, scattering and reforming, scattering again. Then came their counterparts, things built from ichor itself, simular in shape to the birds but heavier, leaving red trails in the air as they flew in tighter arcs and hit harder when they struck.
The two kinds ignored each other almost completely. Both were more interested in the larger conflict below.
Arrax was watching a group of celestials attempt to upend one of the wooden giant's legs at the root when the sky above the plain split.
Something enormous pushed through the red cloud.
It came down slowly, which made it worse. Things that large should fall fast. Instead it descended with the patience of something that knew it could not be stopped, a shell the size of a city, curved and ridged and ancient looking, trailing rivers of water from its edges that fell in solid blue columns down to the plain below.
A turtle. Vast beyond proportion, its shell a plateau, its head the size of a cathedral. And from the cracks in its shell poured pure blue water, ocean blue, the kind Arrax remembered from photographs of places he'd never quite saved up enough to visit.
The water hit the plain and the red ichor recoiled from it, the ground splitting and hissing where the two met. Celestials caught beneath the falling columns were flattened under the weight of it, pushed down into the ichor and drowned by a substance entirely foreign to everything that made them. They dissolved slower than they reformed. Some didn't reform at all for a long while, the blue water holding them apart.
The wooden giants paused in there walking and looked up.
The turtle descended further, unbothered, the water pouring more freely now as its weight pressed the air around it flat.
Then from the east of the red sky, a shape appeared that moved the way the turtle did not. Fast. Direct. Purposeful.
It was black and red. Feathered and enormous, easily a hundred metres from wingtip to wingtip, its red eyes catching the light of the plain below as it dropped into a dive that bent the clouds around it from the speed.
It hit the turtle without slowing.
The sound of it crossed the entire plain.
The turtle's shell cracked at the impact as the eagle's talons found the edges and pulled, peeling the shell from the turtle's back with a grinding shriek of ancient material giving way. The turtle's water poured freely now, a waterfall the size of a small sea crashing down to the red plain, flooding entire regions, celestials and wooden giants alike retreating from the sudden tide.
The turtle's body, exposed and vast, fell slowly after its shell. It hit the plain with a tremor that knocked celestials off their feet across the entire visible horizon.
The eagle rose with the shell gripped in its talons, carrying it higher and higher until the blue water within stopped falling and sloshed quietly, contained.
The shell had become the eagle's.
Arrax stared.
He hadn't planned that. None of it. The eagle had not come from his hands. It had come from the plain itself, from whatever logic the blood world had started building on its own whilst he watched everything else.
'There you go,' he thought.
He stayed a while longer, watching the flood recede slowly back into the ichor as the celestials reformed and the wooden giants resumed their circuits and the red and blue birds resumed there own private war in the sky above. The eagle with its ocean shell circled at a height where it looked no larger than a hawk, watching everything below with the same patience Arrax had felt in it when it dived.
The plain would be fine without him.
More than fine.
Arrax turned away and stepped back through the crack in the void, the red warmth of the plain fading behind him as the emptiness of the space outside reclaimed him. His wings flicked once, adjusting to the change, and he walked until the steady glow of Veldanava's work came back into view ahead.
The god was surrounded by what could only be described as rooms, though rooms was entirely the wrong word for structures that had no walls and were defined only by the quality of light and feeling within them. One pulsed with warmth. One was cold and vast. One moved constantly, its edges shifting like the surface of water. One was utterly still, stiller than the void itself, stiller than anything Arrax had thought stillness could be.
Veldanava stood at the centre of them with his hands clasped behind his back, looking between them the same way he had looked between Light and Darkness at the very beginning.
Arrax stopped beside him.
"You're doing it again," Arrax said.
Veldanava did not turn. "I am thinking"
"I can see that." Arrax looked at the realms arranged around them. "What are they."
"Possibilities," Veldanava said. "Each one is a place. Each could receive life. Each could become something. But the arrangement matters. Which should sit closest to the living world. Which should be furthest. Which should be known and which should only be reached at the end."
Arrax looked at the warm one. Then the cold one. Then the one that moved and the one that was impossibly still.
"Tell me what each one is," Arrax said. "Not what you want them to be. What they feel like right now."
Veldanava was quiet for a moment.
"The warm one feels like arrival," he said at last.
Arrax nodded. "And the cold one."
"Distance."
"The moving one."
"Becoming."
"And that one." Arrax pointed at the still one.
Veldanava looked at it for a long moment. "Before."
Arrax thought about that. "Before what?"
"Before anything," Veldanava said. "Before the first decision. Before the first word."
Arrax looked at the four of them and rubbed the back of his neck.
"Right," he said. "So. Arrival should be close. Things that arrive need somewhere near to land." He gestured at the warm realm. "Put that one close to wherever life ends up living. The becoming one too, next to it or near it, something in motion belongs near something alive."
"And the cold one," Veldanava said.
"Further," Arrax said. "Not unreachable. But further. Distance feels like something earned, not something given."
Veldanava considered this. "And the still one. The Before."
Arrax looked at it for a while. The stillness of it pressed at the edges of him slightly, not uncomfortably, but with the particular weight of something that predated even his earliest memory.
"That one," Arrax said quietly, "goes furthest. Right at the edge of everything. Not as a punishment." He paused. "As a reminder."
Veldanava turned and looked at him fully. "Of what."
Arrax met his gaze.
"That before all of this," he said, "there was nothing. And that nothing is still out there, waiting patiently to be everything again."
Veldanava held his gaze for a long moment.
Then he turned back to his realms and began, slowly and with great care, to move them into place.