prologue can be found here:
https://armchair-revolutionary.info/hallowed-ground-prologue-the-abyss/
1.5 billion years ago, somewhere on the ancient continent of Columbia, a volcano erupted. Columbia was dying, you see. Continental plates which had been held together as a single landmass for hundreds of millions of years were slowly drifting apart, becoming two. As they separated, the rift between them became a weak point in the Earth’s crust. Magma, glowing-hot molten rock, boiled up from deep within the mantle, vast amounts of it. The magma cooled and formed igneous rocks: rhyolite, granite, andesite, and others. A thick layer of these rocks were deposited, by volcanic eruption or igneous inclusion, and where the volcanoes themselves were located this rock was built up into mighty mountains and cavernous calderas. A few million years later, the continents at last separated, and the gap between them was filled in by water, becoming an ocean. The rocky plains and many of the volcanic mountains were submerged; the tallest of the mountains became islands.
The land at this time was barren, and lifeless – the earliest plants would not evolve for many millions of years when the seawater came rushing in. Nothing mourned for Columbia; it was a vast expanse of harsh, barren, lifeless rock. That is not to say the Earth itself was devoid of life at this point in its history. The oceans teemed with it. These living beings were small and simple and first – multicellular life had only just evolved when our volcano and its sibling were submerged, with plants, animals, and fungi being many millions of years in the future – but there were a lot of them. There were enough of them that, as they died, their corpses formed layers on the seafloor, and then layers atop those layers. Generations upon generations of life lived, and died, and changed.
Eons passed. The life grew larger and more complex. Algaes, corals, and sponges colonized the seafloor, and over millions of years formed colossal reefs which hosted an incredible diversity of life. These reefs dwarfed any that humanity has ever seen. Vast forests of coral and long, fibrous proto-kelp thrived in the warm, calm, tropical waters; animals of every description found food and shelter there. By the time the reefs fully developed, fish had evolved, and a thousand varieties of them thronged the waters, great and small – fish of every description, fish that would be recognizable to a modern viewer and fish that would look completely alien to us. Arthropods, molluscs, and every other conceivable form of marine life (and undoubtedly a few inconceivable ones) made their homes there.
With the oceans came sand and other sediments; with the coral reefs came carbonate rock. Layers upon layers of material were deposited, covered by newer material, and compressed. Sandstone, limestone, dolomite, chert, and other sedimentary rocks were laid down atop the igneous rocks, with the volcanic islands protruding through them. Upon these islands, plant life began to take root, followed eventually by other forms of life. They began to break up the volcanic rocks, mix with them as they died, forming soil. Erosion leveled the peaks and smoothed down the craggy sides of the mountains.
For millions upon millions of years this state of affairs would prevail. Great cathedrals of coral, forests of kelp, multitudinous swarms of fish; lush jungle islands covered in trees and ferns and grasses; insects and animals and creatures we don’t even have words for. The lifespan of this awe-inspiring ecosystem dwarfs the entirety of human history; all of our accomplishments as a race would barely register as a blip on that colossal timescale, and the sheer scale of the structures these living beings built is beyond the wildest dreams of any human engineer. I can almost see it now; can you? The water would have been calm and clear and Caribbean blue, the seabeds shallow, the islands lush and green. Reefs and sandbars and atolls would have surrounded the volcanic islands, some of them reachable on foot at low tide. The climate would have been tropical, the air hot and heavy and humid, with frequent rains and the occasional cooling, refreshing thunderstorm. The rain would cause fresh water to accumulate in the volcanic rock, forming cool springs and brooks and ponds. It must have been magnificent. If we had lived there, if we had seen it, it would have seemed as though it had always been there, and would always be. Nothing lasts forever, of course, and this was no exception.
About 320 million years ago, the ocean basin, and with it the reefs and the volcanic islands, was uplifted when two continental plates impacted each other, folding and faulting the rock strata and pushing the terrain upwards, turning the basin into highlands. The oceans retreated, the seabeds became dry land. The former volcanic mountains, after nearly a billion years as islands, became mountains again. Erosion, and the steady shifting of the tectonic plates, wore down the old islands and the reefs, broke them up, turned them into rolling hills, steep-sided rocky bluffs, deep plunging valleys, wide plateaus. Fresh water pooled, flowed, dissolved the calcium carbonate rocks to form sinkholes and caves and losing-streams. Plant and animal life spread to the old seabeds, and layers of soil were formed. Aquifers were built up, and from some of them emerged hundreds of freshwater springs and seeps. Springs and rainfall drainage flowed through the cave systems and down the hills and bluffs, meeting to form hundreds of streams, running through the valleys and joining together to form rivers. The rivers eroded ravines, deposited sediment in the floodplains of broad valleys, met each other to form steadily larger and larger rivers, and eventually, flowed out to the ocean. Aquatic life, unwilling to give up its territory so easily, found its way inland along these rivers, and set up shop; much reduced from its former glory, it nevertheless made a home there.
Millions more years passed. The continents shifted, the climate changed. Mass extinctions occurred. Ecosystems grew, lived, fell, were replaced by newer ones. The oxygen content in the air gradually went down worldwide. Locally, around our volcano, the humidity decreased, the rains grew more infrequent, the average temperature lowered. The climate grew milder, and seasonal differences became more pronounced. Frosts and snows became common in the winters. Life here changed dramatically, but it endured. It did more than endure. It thrived, just as it had always done here. The rugged and highly varied terrain came to accommodate a diverse range of ecosystems – dense, tangled multi-layer forests, rolling plains, thin-soiled desert-like glades of dry grass and cactus. The soil, though incredibly rocky, was fertile. Water was abundant. The climate was forgiving.
One day, something happened, which must have seemed quite insignificant at the time. Nobody knows exactly when. I doubt it felt like a particularly momentous day; it may not have felt like much of anything at all. Making history rarely feels like making history, and you may not realize you’ve done it until well after the fact. Whenever it was, and whatever it felt like, one day, a human being laid eyes on this place for the very first time. Nothing would ever be the same again.
