One of Each Should Do It

He stepped out of the ground; a tall male caked in lava.


As the lava cooled it fell away revealing a grey man with diamond eyes.


He stared around him at the ravaged landscape, the mountain's slopes a tarnished place, bombed and mined in a terrible battle.


Atomic tanks lay strewn around the valley floor, as if they were children's toys and the wrecks of nuclear jets straddled the earth like fallen angels broken on the rocks.


World War Four had raged for a decade until every state and every nation had ruined themselves in the bankruptcy of violence, their factories silent and empty, the weapons spent. The world was on the edge from this final war.


Dying, the land and the sea were poisoned beyond hope, a wasteland of split quarks and wild neutrinos killing everything that was left, human or otherwise, an unstoppable shroud of quantum death smothering the planet.


In a desperate attempt to flea the apocalypse the three faltering superpowers sent their elites into space in gargantuan ships, a facile, capitulatory act leaving their remnant peoples to die in the killing ooze.


Now those people staggered across the ravaged landscape in search of food and shelter: shelter from the fall-out and the imminent atomic freeze.


But there was nowhere to hide. Everywhere was gone. Everything was dead. Or dying. Better the sun expand and burn this miserable orb than endure the eternal dark of Hell on Earth that was coming.


The man with the diamond eyes looked around at the degradation. He stopped and picked up a handful of scree and squeezed. Bleeding he cast it aside and began to walk towards a house nestled below the giant mountain where he'd emerged.


Inside a family cowered around a failing hologram of their leader. He flailed his arms and explained how a new government would be established in Mars and rescue ships would be sent back for them and all the citizens.


They knew it was untrue but somehow watching the stuttering president sat in his rocket room was comforting, the real but hollow words descending to them in a rain of lies.


As the grey man entered they jumped up and gasped at him, his naked body still smoking from it's lava skin. His crystal eyes sparkled in the irradiated afternoon, like Christmas lights switched on in the city square so long ago.


"Where is the sea?" Asked the grey man with a dry voice not used before.


The family looked at each other.


"The sea? The sea is a thousand miles away on the coastal plane due East" Said the the mother pointing out of the window.


"Thank you" replied the man. "I am the Land".


He turned and set off walking the thousand miles to the eastern sea.


At the coast another figure emerged, this time from the ocean. A blue woman with liquid hair stepped out of the surf and padded on to the sand. Her feet made puddles in the prints.


Naked and coated in salt, she headed towards a beach shack, where a rusting VW bus was parked and a surfboard lay split on the thrift like a cracked coffin lid.


The salted woman walked in to the creaking hut to find an aging hippy sat in a low and tattered deck chair.


He was wearing century-old headphones plugged into a machine. His bearded face bobbed up and down rhythmically to the beat.


When he saw the woman he jolted and dragged the headgear off.


"Who the fuck are you lady?"


"I am the Sea"


"Well, you sure are a sight for sore eyes. You're the first person I've seen in months. Would you like some tea? It's boiled, so it shouldn't kill ya straight away."


"Where is the big mountain?"


"The, wha-, the big mountain? What, the really big one? That'd be thataway, West, but it's a damn long trek. It'd take weeks. What da ya wanna go there for? I could take you some of the way in ma bus if you want."


The blue woman turned and walked West leaving a trail of wet salt. The hippy thought he heard a thank you as if whispered through a puddle.


The blue woman met the grey man five hundred miles inland.


"It's been too long my love. A trillion lifetimes."


"Yes, but we are together again."


"There will be only we, as it was before."


"They have spoilt the world, the world we started."


"It is time to start again."


The two beings embraced warmly, the grey and the blue becoming one.


The woman then lay flat on the ground looking up at the man stood over her staring down at her smiling face. He smiled back and outstretched his arms.


"Forever Land" she mouthed through water.


"Forever Sea" he replied through stone.


Slowly the man grew and grew into a vast range of mountains surrounded by an enormous plane, together forming a gigantic island the size of a hemisphere. At it's centre a towering mist-capped peak with a diamond summit.


The woman's body and hair turned into blue seawater and gradually deepened and deepened to cover the world and everything on it, except for the newly formed land at its centre


One sea and one continent was all that was left. The rest, the rest of everything, swept away.


To heal again, the Earth required a new beginning, the ancient binary start.


One of each.


Tethys and Pangea.