Maa

Maa: The War

The world was full of warmth. Everything as it should be. My children prospered and passed at their times; rejoicing my existence with every goodness and every creation.

The world was full of warmth. Everything was as it should be. My children spread into the stars but not like the others who came. They did so in their network and intelligence collecting systems. They did so socio-politically. But never to take the stars like their counterparts who came. They were content with this body of mine; this world they coined "Gaea" in their mother-tongue.

Gaea was full of warmth. Everything as it should be...

No.

This isn't how it should be.

It's no longer warm as every blood dropped onto the earth falls upon me like icy cold water droplets. It's no longer alright as children are mercilessly slaughtered and women deprived of their honor. It's no longer the world I desire; the world reflecting my face, when my people are betrayed for greed and self-satisfaction, nor when they betray one another.

What is this?

The sky looks different with those ships landing carelessly into my forests. My islands are breaking.

The ocean looks different with corpses from both sides of battle changing the color to a vibrant red. My sea children are dying.

The earth looks different...it looks different-

The air vibrated with an ominous warning and every fiber of my being, every place in my being felt the coming of something...dire. For the first time, since the birth of my Time, I held my breath and the wind stilled. Foreboding silence of the like never seen before in the world filled Gaea, freezing every soul in the battlefield.

Like a work of prisms, scorching red pillars of power crashed out from the hovering motherships scattered about the outer spaces of Gaea's atmosphere and onto the surface. They shattered floating cities, nations, and islands. They broke apart homes and decimated acres upon acres of homelands and forests. They parted seas and flooded coasts.

Lives...faded in multitudes.

Like an unstoppable ripple effect on the ocean surface...lives vanished.

No.

Screams filled my head as I trembled in red betrayal and white horror.

No more. Stop.

My children's sobs as the final battle raged at the Holy Tree wrecked my form as my being changed in reflection to the world, the colors of my body fading away to chilling white and blue as the world froze over into an Ice Age. I curled in upon myself, hackles rising as I tried to protect what was most precious to me.

NO.

The words of those who never believed in me- regardless of which side they laid on the battlefield- shook me with their confessions. They moved me with their last thoughts and memories of whom they treasured behind the devilish faces of killers and warriors.

Enough! That's enough!

Rage and unending pain cried out from me against the defilement of my body and I shrieked; piercing icy spikes jutting from across the oceans and seas into space as wooden counterparts roared out from the earth in response. The sky turned red and the explosions shook the world as everything touched by the deadly spikes exploded. Whatever failed to combust in the cursed sky was crushed by the vines and writhing limbs of nature or water.

To describe it as the end of the world would not be too far off the mark, but only in human eyes. This was far from my limit if this was all I had to do to protect my children. Crying out again, earthquakes continued to shake the world from its core, the Holy Tree, and its last haven. Gaea, according to my children, had taken arms.

Massacre.... Conscious, I watched the lives I took now flood the land in their red and with their corpses. This is how it felt to kill....

How miserable-

And to bring me to this place-

How sinful-

Pain.

All feeling of warm faded away from within me and when I looked, I saw the knife planted deep within me. Looking out, I saw the first mother-ship in the deep space finishing its execution of a light beam.

M-my Tree...my Tem-mple...my body-

Slashing down, the eternal touch of misery, torment, and winter, stormed into me painfully as the haven shattered. Crying out at the overwhelming experience of such torture, I opened my eyes to the mortal realm for the first time in a long time.