Once upon a time a long long time ago, the world was nothing but ocean. The watery depths were unreachable and the horizon was clear and blue. No life inhabited the dew drop that was this planet except for one lonely crow, let’s call him... Ivan. Ivan was but no normal crow, for he had flown his entire life searching for a place to rest his tired wings. So it was eventful when on a day like any other he spotted a small gray stone. It reached from the water no larger than his two small talons put together. As he swooped down and stood for the first time he looked out at the large empty expanse wishing for something more than endless blue. Overwhelmed by his luck for finding a resting place, he momentarily forgot the small satchel at his side. After never really examining it before during his long flight, Ivan pulled the small leather bag around to his front. The small bit of twine that held the puckered edges together was frayed and thin. He used his beak to slowly pull the thread loose, opening the bag for the first time. Ivan then squawked as he found that the bag was deceptively large, seeming to go on forever into a dark pit rimmed with gold and satin from what he could see. In his surprise he jumped, fluttering his wings sending what seemed like a small pebble from the open satchel into the water. Ivan watched the stone sink slowly into the depths and just as it was enveloped by the darkness of the sea, the ground began to shake.
Frantic, Ivan leapt from the platform and circled it, watching it shake and crack into pieces. The surrounding water rippled and bubbles started floating to the surface. A muffled roar came from beneath the water as though a giant monster had been released. Moments later large rocks penetrated the surface shooting up and nearly skewering Ivan with their pointed peaks. As Ivan retreated backward he then stopped and hovered, watching large mountains form. It seemed endless as a vast continent rose from the water before him. But the shaking didn’t stop, he watched as a network of rocky structures sprawled out from the spot where the stone had sunk, like veins of the beating heart that was now the earth.
What felt like hours later the shaking suddenly stopped, the silence like the hush after the crack of a whip. Ivan perched on the highest peak he could find and took in these new lands. Although just solid gray rock, the new speckling of islands and towering mountains were fascinating. He decided to fly on, exploring the great fingerlike structures that reach for the sky. “Was it possible that the one small stone had transformed into all this?” Ivan thought to himself. His mind spinning with ideas of what else he could make with this magical bag, he landed wanting to dump the entire contents out and see the world unfold, but the bag was normal. Insisting he had seen wrong Ivan closed and opened the bag again and again, but it was unchanging. The once endless abyss was gone, replaced with a plain leather bottom with no contents well, almost none.
Tucked under the folds of the leather seam was something small and fluffy. Ivan used his thin beak to pick it free and then his claws to pull it from the bag. Precariously held between two of his talons he examined its thin pail stalk and white harry plumage. Quickly a short strong wind blustered past and blew the small thing from his grip. Hurriedly Ivan grabbed for it but it swirled out of his reach, the breeze whisking it away as quickly as it had come. He watched as it disappeared into the blue horizon. Mourning the loss of his new interest, he slowly walked with his bag onward until a rock became dislodged from the mountainside rolling until it stopped at his feet. In his anger, Ivan was about to kick it away when he noticed it start to tremble. Ivan looked up to see the ground quake once more but in a new way, like a tidal wave coming toward him he saw mountain peaks shake one after another. The rumble rushed past him as he scrambled to fly away not wanting to be crushed by the looming rocky overhang he was under, but once he looked back down to the ground, it had stopped. The wave had carried on in a linear fashion, away from the direction the thing had blown away to.
Gliding back to the ground, Ivan gawked at the bright green blades of grass pushing through the cracked stone. Not just grass but vines that curled up the face of the mountains, trees that reached up and spread their great canopies shading the shrubs and moss at their base. Ivans head swam as he saw hundreds of new colors in the flowers, red roses, orange poppies, yellow daisies, and purple tulips in what were now vast plains, and drooping wisteria and clouds of morning glory. The drab stone turned to living, breathing forest.
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