Boom!
At the end of the starry sky, flames blazed, magma surged, and land stretched endlessly before suddenly exploding, all of it vanishing into nothing.
Yet after the shattering, within a short time, those many flames actually manifested anew. Exploding and raging, the flames gave birth to land from the formless, evolving into a continent. The continent then spread outward, and countless flame-born creatures emerged within it.
These creatures possessed complete intelligence and complete lives. Their nature was the spirit within fire, while their life was the flame itself.
Then the flames scorched the earth, and volcanoes rose one after another. Those surging, boiling fire veins burst from the ground like bamboo shoots after rain, one after another breaking through the soil's confinement as rolling magma poured forth.
This magma seemed to contain an indescribable power. Wherever it passed, the earth collapsed and all things perished. Countless flame-born creatures died as a result, until the entire land finally exploded and turned to nothing.
Then a ball of flame emerged and began the next cycle. Again and again, it seemed endless, eternal and unchanging.
To the flame-born creatures within, life was even more fleeting. They had only a few breaths of time before perishing, leaving behind not the slightest inheritance. Then, in the next cycle, the flame-born creatures that emerged would retain no memory of the previous generation and could find scarcely any trace of them. Even if they wished to investigate, they had neither sufficient time to do so nor enough time to learn, grow, and establish a complete awareness of the world.
Perhaps their lives existed only as flowers to adorn a great god, to demonstrate that deity's omnipotence—that creating things and granting them spirit took no more than a turn of thought.
Destruction was disorderly, yet each cycle