"Nature´s Vengeance" by Crista Whyte

            They fight me. I fight back. They ruin me. I devastate them in return. They cry out for mercy. But I am not merciful, or benevolent. They have never understood this. They have never understood that my power can never be under their control. So they fight and drag and pull with their mortal strength, tearing down my majestic lands. They call themselves creators, but I parry: what creator must first kill in order to make?

            I take my vengeance by the thousands, just as they have taken from me by the thousands. The holes they leave in my earth, I make in their homes. Their bodies may litter the ground, but what dies is given back to me to replenish what has been taken. Still, they never learn. Their souls are black as night, their minds corrupted by their theories, their plans and intrigues. They burn me, cut me, bleed me dry. They have made me hollow. They have scraped the meat from my skin and bones and left me a shell of hatred and spite.

            I have come to see that torture is the only way. Bend them to knees and strip them of their stolen hides and they will break as they have broken me. There is a clearing in my forest where I keep them, locked in place by chains dredged from deep within the earth which bite at their flesh and draw forth crimson blood. The ground is sacred, saturated with years of revenge. There, they beg for mercy. They kneel before the earth, before the mighty evergreens, and mumble sweet prayers to their impossible Gods. They forget, these mortals, how there was a time when there were no Gods. They forget that I was once their savior, that to take in moderation was fair. I did not seek vengeance then.

            Their arms are pulled back behind them, drawn by chains held by the fierce Air. The tension is so tight, they tremble, but can neither fall forward nor back. And they stare to the ground, to the blood drenched blades of grass curling around their naked feet. They dare not look up. They have learned never to look up.

            They are watched by my creature, made from my hatred and anger. He is shaped like a man and once he walked among them with steel spikes in his large, heavy hands. He is my warrior and champion. He is nameless and lives with me now, after the mortals attacked him with flame. He is burned, like me. His flesh is scarred and sags beneath his body of metal armor. His left eye is lame; his face is contorted and torn. But he is still good. He still kills. He still kills for me.

            Those I keep on my sacred grounds I keep to kill. There is no joy left in mass executions, in freak storms, in the powers that crumple the earth. Mortals will ever rebuild, will ever kill more of my children. To satiate my thirst I take them now, soul by soul, to these sacred grounds. I chain them, I bleed them, I beat them for their defiance, just as they have beaten me. And when they are weak, when they have lost their power to speak, I kill them. I let them fall lifeless and let them silently pray to their false Gods for a life beyond their own. I know there is none. Their rotting flesh will feed my children and so I too will rebuild. With every death I will grow, I will be filled once again with all that has been taken from me. A day will come when I will not be hollow. And they will fear me then, as they always should have, and they will repent. The massacre of my children will stop and the blood will pour no more.

            I will no longer be hollow and they will repent, and the blood will pour no more.