This Breathing World

.. that is curtailed of this fair Proportion,
Cheated of Feature by dissembling Nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into This Breathing World, scarce half made up

This world was put in its place by the Creator, who placed a prince on it to form it as he would. The world was to be beautiful, diverse and alive; the only condition put on the prince was that he must not destroy anything. That which was made must be left to grow and develop as it willed. Many things were made by the prince, some fair, some strong, some both, and the world took shape and grew.

After some ages, the prince began to look at some of his earlier work with dissatisfaction. Some of the races could have been better designed, some of them had drifted from his intent. The beauty he had put in the world was not as beautiful as it could have been. So the prince took a long time in thought and began creating new and better races, and to ensure that they would drive out the older, inferior races, he made them strong in magic and power.

But the older races were resiliant. Individually weaker than his new creations, they joined together and fought the new ones with a strength greater than the prince had thought they possessed. He was forced to create creatures of strength and power with less and less beauty, to guard his new creations, but these guardians too began to move away from his intent.

Seeing his new creatures dying out and their guardians becoming renegades, the prince began to bend the rule of destruction. He made lands uninhabitable, started catastrophes, failed to respond to request for aid, and, eventually, inevitably, he destroyed a creature which threatened the last of one of his most-loved races.

In the following years, he exercised his power of destruction more and more often, realizing it was as strong as his power of creation. Races perished; civilizations died; fertile pastures and leafy forest turned to deserts of sand and barren rock. But even so, it was not enough. Still, the world was not as he thought it should be.

For many years, the prince meditated and experimented until he was sure of his course. He would speak a word of power that would utterly destroy all life on this world, sink the lands beneath the oceans and allow him to start afresh. He began to speak the word. As he spoke it, a wave of darkness swept out from him, with every plant or animal caught in that wave dropping lifeless to the ground. As he kept on speaking a second wave came from him; a wave of silence. As this swept over the land the earth began to crumble, silently and slowly, into the oceans.

But this destruction was beyond the bounds the Creator was able to suffer; he descended to the world and confronted the prince. Terrified of himself being destroyed, the prince stopped in mid-word and cast his soul out of his form and into those of the dead creatures that had not yet been swept into the sea. These creatures became animated with an undead life that contained a fragment of the prince's soul:

"Surely you will not break your own rule and destroy us too?" they spoke to the Creator. "no," said the Creator "I am what I am. I will not break the rule." "But," he added "I will send new lords to rebuild this world, and I will set them in opposition to you. Their creatures will hate your undead selves and strive to undo them and you. Your older races they will deal with as their natures suggest. As you wait for them, consider this: The door is still open - it is not yet shut. If it becomes shut, it will be by your free will alone."

And so the Creator left, and the dark prince, malice glowing in a thousand undead eyes, waited ...