The Lonely Angler

He was there in the beginning and through the eternal ending. He'd scattered his seed 'cross numerous worlds. They flourished. They perished. Flora, fauna, innumerable forms, aeons of evolutionary warfare. Extermination of the unfit without the mercy of design. Quadrillions of cadavers paving a road to ecological Eden, but ending in extinction. Not one Gaian pretender made it. Not one. He'd watched them all. Sometimes sentience emerged, a pestilence of society, technology and civilisation; a pandemic of philosophies and politics; a cholera of culture and creeds. He'd walked among the souls, one of the invisible, the dispossessed, the unwashed, the untouchable, the damned. He never told them who he was. They would never have believed him. Wars to shame evolution's tooth and claw, punctuating the stagnation of peace. Millions of messiahs, plethora of prophets, successive suffering saviours. Legions of artificial gods, invented, combined, renamed, cast down, reborn, denounced, forgotten. Tedious debates and disagreements over the nature of nature. Did intelligence begat intelligence? Or did intelligence emerge from dust and water? Was there an all powerful deity? Or did the clockwork of mathematics rule them? Was free will an illusion? Or could they choose evil over good? If only they knew, they might laugh at their own folly. Or at least don a wry smile. But that was long ago... ... he looked skyward from an impossible place at the impossible infinity of the cold black sky. Void once more, void forever. He laid down his fishing rod and stretched, barely rocking the impossible boat... He'd seen continents on mantle seas hurtling across countless worlds, crashing waves of mountain ranges ebbing back to plains. ... floating on a fishless lake, in a treeless mountain valley, under a cloudless sky... He'd seen the planets born from dust, held close and safe by their mother star, bathing them with light and life. Then her betrayal taking her offspring back to her womb, as she bloats into old age. ... on a world sustained by fading memories, a faint facsimile of forgotten realms, secure from the cosmic cataclysm... He'd seen the galaxies fly apart, pinwheeling across the cosmos, ever faster, ever distant, ever lonelier island universes. Star lights popping or fading, returning to the dark. ... where he could finally rest. No wind to disturb his thoughts, no heat nor cold to try his nerves, no life to stain his soul... He'd seen totality ripped apart, the very last particle dissolving into dilute energy. Then nothing. ... time lagged, then eased, then stalled to sleepy irrelevance as cosmic clocks ceased to count. He drifted towards eternity and contemplated... Maybe he'd daydream a new universe. Written 26th April 2017 Entry to "yggdrasil me" contest