Encounter

The first story does not open with an egg or a sunrise—it begins with an encounter:

A sound asserted itself amidst the frenetic buzzing of noon-time. It stirred a man from his midday stupor not by its volume, but by virtue of its alienness—the unfamiliar pitch gained purchase in the iron string of his spine and he was filled with unease. He stood up and shook the cobwebs out of his head. Taking stock of his surroundings, he realized that he had dozed off next to the tent that he had pitched, a neat six-by-six human living space amidst the virginal chaos of the dense forest around him.

For a while, the man tried to place the sound in his mental catalogue. He quickly decided that it was too melodious to be the work of uninspired cicada, too self-aware to be the rustling of wind in the trees, not quite angry enough to be the warning of a snake; yet, despite his best efforts, he couldn’t figure it out. As if demanding further investigation from him, the sound rose to a fevered pitch.

Curiosity piqued, he started searching for the source of the noise, a taxing exercise given that the heavy air of the forest conducted the sound such that it seemed to be coming from every which way. When he turned his head left, it sounded to his right and when he turned his head right it sounded to his left. He was on the verge of giving the whole matter up when he realized that the sound had gotten steadily louder as he had been walking towards a particularly large and gnarled sequoia. Spying a large hollow at its base, he dropped to his knees and brushed aside the branches and leaves that obscured it to find the thing he had been looking for. He leapt back with a great yell.

It was a creature that he had never seen before—it had a number of bizarre appendages whose functions the man couldn’t even begin to guess at. Its resting spot disturbed, the thing looked back at man, but not once did its song cease. Its absolute calm unnerved the man and out of sheer terror, he picked up a rock and hurled it down at the thing, killing it.