Once upon a time, there was starving Moth. Starving Moth lived upon the World’s back, and starving Moth did not dream, for there were none to be had. Starving Moth was ordinary, and would have lived as all other things do, save for one thing: starving Moth was hungry, and starving Moth could not eat.
His hunger grew as he did. He did not grow longer or wider as his peers managed to do, only older. He didn’t eat enough, doctors said. But he would eat a king’s feast, said his parents back. He just never grew — perhaps he is simply born to be small. But he was not. People who are born to be small still grow, have age on their bones, the doctors said. Your child who is twenty now has stretchy skin and organs and cartilage that act as though they are those of one who is eight. His head is bigger than his torso. Your child’s body is still a child’s, despite the years. Time has dripped off him like water from a waterbird’s down. At least his mind is as it ought to be — older, perhaps too fanciful, but aren’t they all.
His parents disagreed. Their child was not as he ought to be. That day, starving Moth was told not to return home.
The following night saw starving Moth watched by Moon, huddled in the bushes beneath his parents’ window, shivering under a scratchy blanket on a thin mattress he never outgrew, awaiting the morning when his parents would let him back inside. But when morning arrived from the inevitable clockwork of the sun, he was not let in. There was no dread there, beneath the window. The shutters remained tight and lifeless. No sorrow, no pain. Starving Moth understood.
Came noon, starving Moth was bade farewell.
Starving Moth disappeared into the world, but not as others do. Starving Moth did not work, and starving Moth did not sleep — yet nor did starving Moth find a place to die, fall through the stormdrain grating of history’s sieve. Starving Moth simply persisted, and not quietly.
As he always would.
Growing Moth walked the world. Where his soles touched ground, his scrawny belly filled. Slowly, beneath the cypress trees and upon the mosses squelchy with water that wells between feather-spread toes, his wanderlust slaked. In the coastside forests and whipped-bare windblown alpine cliffsides growing Moth gained a palate, desiring beyond a fulfillment of appetite.
With child’s steps, growing Moth walked beaches and forests and Private Property Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted and mountains and lowlands and watersheds. Growing Moth walked the lips of reservoirs that blocked the flow of salmon North, and growing Moth swam the dams that reflected Moon, though growing Moth did not make acquaintance with it yet. Growing Moth saw the world, drew it into himself. In this way, not sandwiches and Your bill is forty twenty-five would you like cash debit or credit nor dumpsters and bolt cutters with the tag still on, did growing Moth eat, and in this way did dreams bubble beneath his skin.
It was with this crowning growth that his skin grew tight.
Night came. On the lip of the reservoir beyond the city lights with the rumble of turbines beneath his fingers, growing Moth leaned down upon the retaining wall, so broad it might be a road. The Moon above so wide — it might have swallowed the reservoir and all its water and the distant mountains like ridges on toenails and all the lights in the distant cities and have room to spare — waited. In its searchlight that submerged the world in 90’s photography, Moon lay face-down. That night, gone from the map and forever hence with the Moon reflected in his open-sleeping eyes, growing Moth slipped into dream.
In all dreams, one does not know why they are there until they have arrived at the apex. He flew through jungled upper stories of wisteria. Upside down, this forest of snow and frosted blood petals reached upwards, and dreaming Moth under that gravity ascended for the heavens which were the ground: a sky denser with stars than the beach is with sand.
At this floor of stars where his hair draped and looped along constellations dreaming Moth rested, exhausted and beaten, Moon beneath him and inches from his fingers. When he leaned up to rest in the crook of the snow-tree, his fingers found a marble. The ceiling of other suns was so close that the air was white. This marble, blue as lapis, fit perfectly between his teeth. There under the blinding stars dreaming Moth asked, What is your name?
The marble said, I am the World. You dream upon me, yet you are not mine. Give yourself to me.
Dreaming Moth saw that which was the World in the waking: a human, and not a multitude-creature as dreaming Moth was in the dreaming. Dreaming Moth saw an opportunity. I am hungry, dreaming Moth said with lie-bleeding lips. And I am not ready yet. My dreams as of yet are unripe, hard and sour. If I am fed, my mind will grow sweet. Then, you may eat me.
Then eat, the greedy World said. “Eat the foxes,” and gave dreaming Moth the keys to that-which-lies-in-waking that Moth might devour and become sweet and succulent as he described. The bitting went clack-clack-clack against his teeth, stuck there in the pocket of his cheek, and dreaming Moth was glad.
In the sky inches above, Moon unspeaking watched the World and dreaming Moth make their deal. And when their bodies dissipated the dream collapsed: the rain became torrential downpour; the ceiling that was the floor splintered, the air turned sour. Moon turned and vanished, and in its absence dreaming Moth with eyes that remained looked up, saw himself in the constellations and pressed the World tight beneath his tongue. Then, with a cracking of cedarwood and snapping of frozen amber shattering inside, he fell upwards into the blistering abyss with his jaws clenched wide.
Back into the world he tumbled, and himself-type Moth picked himself up and walked anew from the river dam. Devour, the fleeting thought from his dreams said. The key in his cheek warmed. So it was with ease that Moth opened his eyes twice as wide.
Moth wandered. Moth first ate that which the World had given the original keys to, the ones that would fill the stomach of anyone other than Moth, and so it was with ferocity that Moth devoured the sea and the sky and the night and the day. The World, blind beneath Moth’s tongue, could not see to stop the Moth when he etched new keys upon the ring within his cheek-pocket, and it was in this way that Moth did not discriminate in his feasting. Moth ate, chewed thickly, grew a little taller, and his stomach became a land of swords against his liver. Beautiful, came a word from above, and when Moth heard it he came back to himself in the middle of a half-ebbed rainforest, bursting at the seams. Slowing. Groggy. Confused, not knowing where to go next. It was in this state that unfulfilled Moth told the World that he could now see, ethereal form at his side yet still blinded from being under his tongue. "Bring me more, please."
The World did not hear the exhaustion in Moth’s voice, nor see when Moth drifted into the dream and returned seconds later, lean. The World is not known for halting a giving-of-things once it has begun. “If that is what it takes,” the World said with parts gone it had not said could go, and the World forfeit the ground and the woods and the birds and the deer that stalk the roads, and the World gave the ravens and the crows and the creatures far and wide that lie alone. When the World was spent, slaked Moth left for many weeks into the dream, and the World thought him dead as others often are when they spend too long in the dream. It awaited patiently Moth ready to be devoured by the World, as Moth had promised — but he did not come.
After many days and nights, emboldened Moth returned wrapped in a checkered scarf of black and blue, a fanciful suit of cheap embroidery sashed over his burst-like-grapeskin tender flesh and raw-peeled-muscle limbs. "More, please," emboldened Moth told the World.
“If that is what it takes,” the blinded and numbed World said.
Emboldened Moth did not hear the pain, nor the anguish. Drunk on the devouring of creation emboldened Moth was; thus, like a barkeep unaware of an overdose: to emboldened Moth the World gave the creatures of the deep, the plundered treasures of the never-found fossils, the guarded knowledge of the caves never found, the secret places never trod. And after the deluge, the World wept, for it was exhausted. Parts were gone from it that it never knew it had, and dreams it still had not gained. It dawned upon it then, wrenchingly and at last, that it would not survive much more of itself being eaten. It was already shreds of itself. It would never dream.
At last, emboldened Moth wiped his lips, and emboldened Moth left for a long, long time.
The World healed slowly, as it always does. But as all carnivores must eat meat and as all trees must reach for sun, so too does brilliant Moth grow. Many years had passed since growing Moth had first wandered the land with the keys-for-teeth to eat the day and night: now, even bits of the sky were returning to bloom. And all carnivores return to their hunting grounds, under a dappled sunset many years later, dream-air still thick in his lungs, brilliant Moth returned in a dusk-white rider's coat and blue-checkered felt scarf and dove-leather gloves. In this attire brilliant Moth told the World, "More, please."
World had no touch, no sight, no smell, no mind save for that which to breathe and speak. But despite it all, the World gave, terribly weak though it was, and what the World gave was all that was left: itself.
When shining Moth finished, that which used to be the World wept for all that was lost and prayed to nobody and everyone that shining Moth would not return. The World can return from nothing. And for a while, when shining Moth did leave again, it seemed once again that shining Moth would not return from the dream, and the World healed once more. But as all carnivores must eat meat and as all deer stop in the road for headlights, shining Moth returned.
"No more," said the World, but it and shining Moth knew that no words could stop a change like this once it had begun. The World knew that all shining Moth had to do was ask, and the World would provide.
But ready Moth’s keys-for-teeth remained shut. When ready Moth spoke, his words were flavoured with the starlight of suns now eaten and his syllables were coloured with devoured devotions of autumn and spring, and when his throat gave way it was to rich mahogany and ochre timbre wrought of the woods, and the unspoken language of his hands and limbs was of gentle mountains swallowed whole. Ready Moth said, "I am not here to eat. Protect me while I sleep, and I shall emerge beautiful. I have promised you my dreams, but you will not get them. This is a time of change, you see, and you were too slow to see it.
“Protect my body that it might see day.”
The World did submit to this, knelt to this, for it was not a devouring. Ready Moth climbed a tall hill with the thing once called the World by his side, then clambered into the branches of the yew tree there and hung from his knees, wrapped himself in his travelling cloak the colour of dragonfly wings. And for a while, he jerked and spasmed inside the cocoon, but then ready Moth fell still and his coccoon-walls went milky, and all was quiet in the dark. Then, at last, the World believed once more that it might recover and Moth might go.
But slumbering Moth's cocooning was not quiet. Decades passed this time, and in that span the World’s keys inside slumbering Moth’s mouth sharpened in the soup that was slumbering Moth, and through their singing whenever he clacked his teeth slumbering Moth’s dreams reverberated wherever there was air to breathe.
And so.
Every new moon, birds and butterflies and flying machines fell from the sky as their feathers forgot the air; trees shrunk back into saplings as they forgot which way to grow; skin broke open long-healed scars and sealed over as animals remembered older ways of being. Fallen leaves gathered in bedroom windowsills and mottled into insect wings under moonlight, and by dawnlight moon-orchids erupted in waves over grasses grain, and not at first but eventually with the tides came a sacred fragrant air took place of that wind which had made the worms in the soil grow big and strong that they might devour the stars, shrunk them down again and lost their minds to storage in the breaking-reforming dreams of slumbering Moth.
But that was not all. Slumbering Moth had not forgotten his origins. In cities, statues grew the heads of rams, libraries sprouted material arcane in place of texts on eyelashes and fingernails, and all that was the world at day turned into the world at dawn, and all that was the world at dusk turned into the world at midnight or one o' clock in the morning, and all other hours became those hours when change is bound to happen, and all of this wrought itself from the dreams of slumbering Moth who held all the keys to the World in his mouth.
Decades, years, days, hours, and seconds. When sated Moth emerged from the cocoon that had soaked and fed upon what remained of the World, the World who had been with sated Moth all this time was gone. What remained was what sated Moth had created.
Bashful and proud and so very far from the starving child he once had been, sated Moth waited for dusk. When it came, sated Moth with six limbs and change climbed his making-tree and turned to Moon, who hung watchful in the sky and had overseen him from the beginning.
"Hello, Moon," sated Moth said. He did not look for the World, for it was he, but he did look to his shoulder as though at another. His tongue held a black spot beneath. "I have grown."
"Hello child," said Moon. “We meet at last, and not in the dreaming. Tell me, where has the World gone?"
"I am the World," said sated Moth who was the World. An orchid-laden wind soaked the hilltop, drying a semblance still wet and unfurling. World-Moth’s dream-self continued as his body shivered and dried, "I crave not destruction. The seasons shall continue on my hindwings, and on my forewings shall be space and time. When I flutter there will be wars and hurricanes, and when I glide there will be prosperity and peace. Between the stars I will fly, and my World will live as I remember it best: the orcas will leap and the humpbacks will breach, and the spinner-dolphins will spin and the elk will eat the saplings when they grow too densely lest my woods be choked by themselves, and the wolves will eat the elk when they grow too plenty lest the forests suffer of stagnation. My falcons will ride on gloved fists and circle their hunting partners to score the turkey-birds in the desert, and my foxes will yip and chew through traps meant to break their feet. My people will make cities and make art and these will not be separate things, and there will be splendor and there will be malice where all things can be. My world shall be a vibrant cacophony of wonder under the sun, and it shall not be eaten by worms nor complacency nor dread nor quiet boredom. In the minds of my animals there will be towers of dreams rose gold and proud like lions, and love that was mine will be shared upon their life. Will you follow me as you once followed the worm-infestation, the rot-succumbed, the lacking-dream, the World-from-Stone that I swallowed? Will you follow me that the people atop my back might have a Moon to aspire towards, or will you find your own cocoon and leave my people to aim for the stars?"
"I am tethered to the world you devoured," said Moon, "but I would follow you regardless.” Moon glinted in the sky, vibrant like it had never been before. “Your colours are splendid and your form is incandescent. The World has changed more times than you know. I believe the World by your reign will grow beautiful. All else failing, of course, the mantle I bear is nothing if not curious, and I long to see how this new World thrives as such a creature as yourself."
And with that, World-Moth and Moon took off, and the land of dreams was born.
Original title: Oxidation of Diffraction Gradients and Photonic Crystals: Advances in Ecological Dominoes.