The Dog of Doom

On the morning that I escaped the surf, crossed the kelp and routed through baked ash, the fire hadn’t finished with the mountains. From each rent in the earth, the yawning maws threw magma skyward and precipitated obsidian, igneousrain that would cool to birth a legend.

Below life’s tectonic torches, huge rivers of ice fled from Belenus’ beacons, gouging land scars to the sea. On the banks of frigid hollows, unclaimed trees clung perilously to hillsides, a broth-thick haar hiding their tenuous roots from Taranis’ ever-hungry gaze.

All that had been here from the start of the world was here yet, and so this land of giants called to me. Every fibre within my soul told me to bark, and bark I did. Thus, the clock was set on Pangea’s errant child.

I, Cu-Sith, the dog of death, shook the salt water from my coat, and heralded the beginning of the end for everything.

In the epoch that followed, the melting of glaciers spawned the birth of cool rain.These frigid downfalls tempered the core’s plasma to a crust, forging muted basalt craters. In time and torrent, the high lava lochs brimmed to beget tarns. Tarms overflowed their high stone walls, sending rock scarring burns seeking rivers. Rivers, first wending to the valley floor to join the kin of the far slope, grew mighty, carving channels on their way to the sea. The sea, ever rising, topped the mountains of Dogger, renting Alba and Bryonia from the wider world.

As the remaining fields of ice sublimated to clouds, snow melt birthed life’s water table, and the spring born mist of creation spread its mystic weave to hide my world and preserve the true gods. In the following peaceful millennia, Whispered mystic creatures were sustained by flora and fauna that they cherished and worshipped in equal measure.

But as rain and wind brought the high mountains low, evolution’s error set its odd shaped paws on this Isle.

You laid your scent in my pristine garden.

Stamped your mortality on this land without graves.

Until you came, I was death’s sole arbiter. Bel’s creatures took all they needed, but not a morsel more. What I harvested in the cold midwinter, Eostre sowed again in Spring.

At first, we lived in peaceful coexistence. Without harming the land, you collected the moraine that the long-gone glacier had discarded, stacking these stones, one on top of the other, to construct the wall of your roundhouses. Your gatherers harvested fruits in the summer to sustain you through the darkened months, and in recognition of these gifts, you raised standing stones to the mother Gods.

You respected my sea, and it fed you.

You cared for the land, and it housed you.

You prayed to the sky, and we guarded your souls through winter storms to warm them again each Beltane.

…But plenty was never enough for the son and daughter of apes.

Timber became your first obsession.

“We need to fell trees for our homes.

We must clear land to grow crops.”

In the beginning, it was the valley, then low rolling tumult, and inevitably, the highest crag on the ghosts of volcanoes was stripped of arboreal clothes. Once mysterious forests became a moonscape of stumps where no Elf could hide. In your craving for lumber, you bared the world of shelter and magic, bear and wolf.

In netting my rivers, you caught salmon and fairy alike. Forests and streams, without their guardians, could never sustain the selkie, the puca or dam-building beaver.

“We need more wood for boats, to go get the things we’ve erased from your once beautiful isle.”

Soon, there was little but coarse grass to hide the scars inflicted at the birth of time. Our partnership reneged, you created new gods to justify your actions, and the circles of stone lay forgotten.

The real Gods spawned creation and countered with erosion.

Fires swept all before floods brought the flames low.

Hurricanes laid the forests down but sowed new shoots to grow.

We Gods knew what to collect and what to replace, but man took and took and then took some more.

Now standing free from the lee of a tree, your roundhouses no longer held the wind at bay. Did you replace the guardians of the gale? No. Eschewing your own creations of stone, you searched out and slaughtered more of my flora to raise up wooden homes with dried grass roofs

Not yet content at having stripped and conflagrated the surface of my world, like the rats you are, you began digging into the earth. Your next fixation, coal.

With the surface shorn free of trees, you discovered aeons-old wood, now stratified below layers of sediment and rock. Soon after, coal’s brother, oil, was found to burn too.

The land, now defiled, you built machines to incinerate the spoil of your mining, flagrantly casting the resultant waste into air and sea.

“We have no water to drink. No clean air to breathe.”

Having stripped the terrain, polluted the rivers and choked the air with your waste, you turned your beady eye to the very fabric of creation and cracked Bel’s building block, the atom.

Not content to kill that which was around you, the contemporaneous. You created poisons for the aeons. Creatures twice as old as the entire span of man would have to learn to live with your spoil.

And so, it fell to me to bark a second time. Hear me now, spawn of evolution’s error, Cu-Sith is on your trail. When you hear my call again, it will mark the end of your reign on my isle.

Your days are now numbered. Cu-Sith is on the hunt. Yet you may be the first creature ever to forgo my wrath.

No, don’t light the fires of celebration. Think not to inhale a collective breath as a calming sigh. For although you may evade the providence that I bestowed on everything since the beginning of time, you’ll do so only through sealing your own fate.

And by the time I come to take the carcass of man. You will have left the world as I found it. Fire and ice.

***

Note

Cu-Sith is the Celtic dog of death. Should you fall under their gaze, you will here three barks. The first is a warning. The second and the god of death is on your scent. Should you hear bark three, your demise is imminent.