Mother whispered to us about the beings on Earth she regretted creating; the ones whose only merits are their minds, but their minds rot so easily. They are not like you, children; they cannot see so clearly. We asked if the eyesight of humans is poor. Mother only chuckled. Her laughter now carries in the wind, wraps around our bodies—water in the clouds, flames in the lava—but her being is gone, plundered by the human masses, only rubble remains, and us.

• • • •

Below us, the humans live in ruins, struggling to rebuild the fallen village their ancestors erected. Plank by plank, crop by crop, huts rise, fields bud, farmhouses populate. And the smiles return. But we do not believe it is a victory they deserve. Mother says revenge is not the answer, but we do not seek revenge, we seek justice. Mother will return when the Earth is once again green, when the water is no longer murky. Our dream will remain only as echoes in the wind as long as the humans continue to stamp their heavy footprints.

These humans are new, but these humans are no different than the destroyers of the past.

Beneath their feet is our creation: lava cooled, hardened, holding layers of unseen blood that had seeped in from war, bones of fallen innocents and soldiers and merchants, of symbolic mistrust and betrayal.

From our positions intermingling at the lip of an active volcano and a low dipping cloud providing a light drizzle, sizzling as it touches the lava, dampening skin and soil as it touches the humans and their new home.

Night falls, torch lights burn, the humans move like a trail of ants into hills. But we continue to brew in our anger about how unjust their ancestors were, and how they can slumber in such peace knowing the fact that their history tried to take the life of us gods, deem us demons.

It will be so easy to snuff out humans. If we allow the clouds to collect, the lightning and thunder to run free, the winds to churn, the lava to spew, the sea to rage, death is inevitable. They will not understand until we dig our claws of fire and water into their wind-like bodies, so fragile, so breakable, so mortal, and they will feel it all under their hands and feet, nails and teeth, flesh and waste. And they will scream and scream and scream. Just as we had. Just as Mother had.

We cannot decide how to kill them, but we agree they must all suffer, they must all die, and we’ll brew them into our lava tea.

We share pain, we share emotions, yet we do not share our thoughts. But there is no need for such a thing for us to reach an understanding, if our goal is the same.

Pour the lava.

Add the rain.

Read the ashes.

Sip the pain.

Mother told us humans read tea leaves to tell their fortune, their future, but we read the ashes in our lava, or the shapes in our clouds, or the footprints washed in by rain in the soil, to see our past. And what they all show us is death.

• • • •

They poured liquid poison into the stomachs of rivers, dumped rancid carcasses on the shores of seas.

A warning ignored. Humans refused to heed. So the unpure waters wail through currents, scream through tornados, roar with fracturing dams, and consume the same way the humans consume water—fetching it, letting it run, wasting it. This warning is not from a god, they said. Gods do not punish the innocent, they said.

The soils shrieked their laugh as the humans’ crops rose tall, taller than what was natural. Their animals grew plump, their feed mixed with chemicals. Everything drained to the same place in the end—the water.

The trees fell until there were people coming in hordes, huts lining up side by side, animals becoming larger than the diameter of the trunks of thousand-year trees when they should be no larger than the width and height of a handful of scattered leaves. Until forests shed like cats’ fur in summer, like the thinning of human hair with age. But this was not because of age.

The people turned on the water god who pleaded, voice only a rasp rather than the trickle of a nearby stream. Cease these actions, the god whispered. Leave what is natural, what is pure. Do not taint the land; do not taint yourselves.

With torches raised, the humans marched in sync, step, step, step. Pointed their fire and yelled, demon, before plunging each small flame into the water god’s body until there was smoke and steam blown away by their banishing winds created by sweeps of hands through the air, shouting victory. But their wind churns the waters, unsettles the rain and clouds, and calls back the still bruised god—not in body, but in spirit.

• • • •

It is obvious what our course of action should be. They will learn if we wither their crops, drain the waters, introduce our sister Famine. Then perhaps our brother Desert might make a visit. The thirst, the mirages, the delusion, the frustration, until like geysers they erupt. Unstable. Turbulent. The same way they allowed the flames to lick and consume us. Within our lingering steam, they will suffocate.

But this isn’t enough; it is not nearly enough.

With only these consequences, it will not even be rough.

• • • •

Destruction was not just a sight, but it was smoking fumes, a metallic taste, a layer of dust against the skin. It was a sound too loud—of both ringing and blocked eardrums, blood rushing through the head, of heartbeats too faint or too loud. It was bodies on the ground, rust sinking into dirt, but the rust was not from metal. And it was maggots on wounds, moss on flesh, torn muscle ignored.

Destruction was the clinking of coin bodies, sensual within the wool pocket, a marriage of copper and gold and silver. It was a sister sold off, a brother abandoned on no-man’s-land, a child in a hut in the wrong place at the wrong time. The uprooted lands that belonged to a community, but because they had no inked parchment papers, no married coins hidden in their clothing, authority held in calloused hands, everything sifted through finger cracks like sand.

Violence was a pleasure house for those who cannot let go.

On their cargo ship, the fire god warned the humans not to sail further if their intent was destruction. But what they saw was only success. What they saw was not a land filled with people, a land filled with life, a land that they would introduce only grief and sorrow.

And so, when they reached land, with an impossible rope, they wound and wound, bound and bound the god’s hands and feet before tossing them into the churning sea that was waiting to extinguish them with a quick swallow as the wave carried them deeper and deeper—with struggle.

A child, a young boy, threw himself where the water met the sand and screamed for mercy too late, begged for the god’s life as though the god were a brother, a sister, a mother, a father.

So, they wound and bound the child too. So, they fed the sea the child too.

Clutching onto the railing above was the child’s mother—hair in a fury, face like burnt wood, hands like slender, broken branches. But the woman disappeared, dragged away by the crew. The god hoped she would not become like their own mother, and the god hoped the family would reunite.

As the god and child drifted in separate directions, ripped apart by the sea’s fluid arms, the god evaporated like their sibling, and the child continued to float.

A fool, the god thought. Just like themselves.

• • • •

We must take away the sun, for the humans are undeserving. They take for granted its warmth, and its ability to replace so many of their destructive contraptions. We must take away fire. Force the humans to rely on each other, and if they don’t, they will perish. They will turn on each other like they had in the past, cause their own downfalls. If there is such a thing as change, this is the time for the mortals to show us. We are not hopeful.

Sometimes violence is necessary for peace.

And sometimes . . . violence may breed disease.

Though the humans are all in deep slumber, a young child creeps from the hut closest to us and wanders to the base of the volcano in seconds, though it should have been hours.

Without water, without warmth, humanity will wane. We’ll hear the humans struggle, and we’ll hear the humans’ scream.

No. The child is near, but why is he here? He should not exist because Death already raised their fist.

We can restore the wind, and away will leave the pain. Mother will return, and Mother we will redeem.

The drizzle of rain lightens, yet the clouds remain unrelenting in their clustered grey masses. But the lava refuses to settle; the heat refuses to leave. The child is now climbing up the layers of cemented past towards us.

Oh, who is this? Has the memory gone amiss?

Do not approach, for you are only earth’s roach.

The child continues to climb, but we tremble under his light steps, feel an earthquake waiting to split us in two—an earthquake that only the child could create.

• • • •

The child fell to his knees with praying palms upwards, held out to the merchant clutching onto bruised peaches and pears. Their sweet honey juices dripped from pierced wounds. With toes dug into the ground, the child bowed again and again, until the merchant sneered, dropped a pair of fruit onto the dirt. Yet the child remained with his head to the ground until the merchant returned inside his shop before he whisked up the fruit and made for the mountains. There, he searched for where the soil was loose, where he knew the unmarked grave of his late mother lay. On a boat he would sail with his father’s new wife at sundown, and he dared not think of waiting until after in fear the mountains would no longer hold the same familiar path of trees upon his return.

Under a tree of drooping branches in an embrace, the child buried the peach.

In the distance, the world was on fire, and no amount of peach or pear could put out the flames.

The child whispered the words his mother left him with. Not a mother’s profession of love to her child, not a hope of health, but words of warning that no one cared to hear:

You don’t need violence for peace. If you buried the violence before it occured, there would be no need for flames. But beneath the earth did not sit violence; beneath the earth sat his mother.

Back in the village, the child offered half the pear to a man he saw often wandering the streets and another half to a younger child whose parents had not returned from the fire.

With an empty stomach, he headed for the ship, noticing from the corner of his eye, a watchful stranger trailing.

• • • •

There are no humans worth saving.

But there is one, just one, whose memory persists. He who is not like the wind fanning the flames, churning the water, but he who is like the grounding earth, like the long-awaited mother.

• • • •

And just before the child reaches the volcano opening, the water god waits to strike with lightning, but the fire god halts their sibling, evaporating them with the lava’s eruptive force. Yet, the fire god knows their sibling will return. And the fire god knows they would make the same choice again and again, even as they realize the child is only a visiting spirit, even as the chaos brews once more in the nearby village. The child falls into the volcano, but before he meets the lava, he becomes drifting smoke, becoming one with the steaming earth.

Out one hut’s window peeks a child with wind whispering through her flaming hair, with the colour of earth and tea leaves swirling in her watery eyes.

And that one child is enough.