Butcher Bird_ A Novel of the Dominion

Two


The Great Divide

The Earth was born in a furnace. When the world grew strong enough, it crawled into the dark void to cool and heal itself. Soon, however, it grew too cold and shivered with ice.
The Earth looked around and found a small star to warm it up. Deciding it liked the neighborhood and the climate, there the Earth stayed.
Life appeared across the Earth, splashed in the water and glided on thermals through the sky. It didn't take life long to grow so abundant that it began preying on itself.
Crows, bats and eagles, the lords of the air, scooped up fish from the seas and dumped them in the desert until the dry lands were piled high with their bones. These carcasses became the Earth's first mountains.
Other animals learned to climb the trees and attack the birds as they hunted for food. The land dwellers decorated the bare trees with the birds' feathers and painted the ground with their blood. The gray earth suddenly had color.
Every creature who lived in the sea—the fish, the whales, the seals, the crabs, the squids and the rays—met in the South Seas and beat their fins, claws and tentacles, and raised an enormous tidal wave. The wall of water shot across the earth, drowning millions of the land and air beasts. This is how the many rivers and oceans of the world were born.
After an eon or two of mass murder, when the surface of the Earth was a stinking slaughterhouse, the lords of the different realms of life met at the ancient human city of Thulamela to see if they could end the butchery. This wasn't all that simple, since the many different creatures of the Earth were going to have to live on the same planet, but give each other plenty of room.
They divided the world into three Spheres, with each Sphere being invisible and out of the reach of the others. Humans and the most numerous animals of the land, sea and air were given one Sphere.
A Second Sphere was home to the rarest creatures—the phoenix, selkies, vampires, barbegazi, corrigans, tengus, lamias, rompos, sylphs, gorgons, volkhs, wyverns, trolls and other exotic beasts.
The last realm was left to the most glorious and dangerous inhabitants of the planet: angels and demons.
So it was that each of these groups lived and grew old and died in its own Sphere, inhabiting the same time and space as all the other Spheres, but rarely touching—unless a creature was powerful or clever enough to learn the spells of crossing over. Because the town meeting that divided the world had taken place in a human city, cities became the places where the creatures who moved from Sphere to Sphere would meet up to talk, joke, eat, exchange spells and news, make love or commit the occasional genocide.
Over the next few thousand centuries, the creatures who dwelled in the second and Third Spheres struck a kind of détente. Unfortunately for the beasts in the First Sphere (which included ninety-nine percent of humanity), they forgot about the other Spheres completely and only glimpsed them in their dreams.
Or so they thought.