Cortrea circled the planet in her workshop, comparing the results to the blueprint. A piping voice interrupted her.
“Mommy, look what I did!”
“Not now, Rhei.” Cortrea frowned, deepening the east sea with a touch of her hand. She shooed wolves into boreal forests. The planet developed in harmony, populated with all manner of greenery and beasts.
“But Mommy,” Rhei said, “I made them for you!”
“I’m busy, sweetheart.” Tectonic plates shifted, splitting continents and species. A few million years of parallel evolution began. “Leave them and I’ll look later, hmm?”
Rhei sighed, clutching the little figures in her hands. They looked like her parents, in a blocky, simple fashion. She had so wanted her mother to be proud.
She crept around the curve of the globe. Carefully, she set her creations down in the tropics.
“Go on,” she said to the humans, “show Mommy what you can do.”
Lindsey Duncan is a chef / pastry chef, professional Celtic harp performer and life-long writer, with short fiction and poetry in numerous speculative fiction publications. Her contemporary fantasy novel, Flow, is available from Double Dragon Publishing, and her soft science novel, Scylla and Charybdis, is forthcoming from Kristell Ink. She feels that music and language are inextricably linked. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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