The checker-shaped black disk plummeted toward the foothills, emitting a continuous high-pitched scream. It crashed on one flat side, the violent impact instantly displacing over one hundred acres of earth to a uniform depth of twenty feet.
An earthquake caused many mountains to the north and west to implode as others rose from the crust of the earth, spitting rivers of fire. The percussive blast headed east, flattening everything in its path clear to the Eastern Ocean, while two tidal waves realigned the map of the planet with punishing walls of water three hundred feet high. Anything alive that didn’t drown was asphyxiated by the toxic cloud that permeated the atmosphere.
Three years later, the dust cloud cleared, allowing the sun to warm the altered landscape. Retreating ice etched new valleys and passes, and rivers began to carve new canyons and gorges.
Eons passed.
Plant-life rekindled in the fertile, volcanic soil, and as the vegetation thrived, herds of grazers appeared, albeit of a different sort than the previous inhabitants. Then the predators arrived, followed by scavengers, and finally humans.
Millennia passed.
The granite disk, whose vertical wall towered one hundred feet above the plain, had a small hole through its center that had filled with earth upon impact. There, a giant banyan tree now grew. It capped a good portion of the mesa like a parasol, anchored by its immense column of tap roots that twisted down the center hole to the pulverized earth below.
The top surface had accumulated a deep layer of rich soil, in which plots of fruits, vegetables, grains, herbs and spices, and nut-laden trees thrived as if tended conscientiously. It was an inaccessible, banyan-shaded paradise.
To the community who, for the past 350 years, had inhabited two large caves in a cliff wall a mile to the west, the mesa—polished and perfectly round—was an enigma. The people believed Picali, the Supreme Creator’s wayward minion, prowled there when in spirit form. When he chose to revert to corporeal form, Picali patrolled the depths of the Roog, a sacred underground lake in the community’s ceremonial cavern, or so it was said.
Centuries passed.
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