When the world was young, there walked Amalasuntha, who was earth's daughter, as well as its keeper. The wilderness was her paradise, and it was also her charge.
Her duty was not, however, to tend life and make it prosper, nor to seek out and shelter the weak and the injured from the endless dangers without. What she was meant for was to allow nature to take its mad and chaotic course.
In the cycle of life was an inherent hierarchy, and in its tangle of webs, all creatures ate and all creatures were eaten. Even the last in the chain would die, and when its body returns to the earth, it becomes food for those in the top of that same chain.
So it would go, on and on and on, for such was mortality.
Yet though all things living must die, nothing is destroyed. They were of the earth that no
