You walk upon the skin of an ancient world—one that was born in fire and violence. In its youth, the Earth was a molten ocean of rock, hammered by asteroids, split open by rivers of lava, its skies choked with steam and ash. Over eons, continents drifted and collided, mountains rose and crumbled, seas filled and vanished, and rivers etched their signatures into stone.

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In the span of human memory, these changes seem slow, but in the language of the Earth, they are as constant as breath. Rock cycles endlessly—magma hardens into stone, stone weathers to sand, sand sinks into the depths to be reborn in fire. Water flows in vast migrations, from the deep aquifers to the clouds, from ice-bound peaks to the open sea, shaping all it touches.

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And yet we carve our mines into the bones of the planet, tearing coal from swamps buried for hundreds of millions of years, pumping oil formed from ancient seas, splitting mountains for their metals. We drill deep to fracture stone for gas, we dam and divert rivers, we drink from aquifers that took centuries to fill. We build monuments and cities from rock older than our species, even as droughts crack the earth and floods erase the work of generations. We draw our boundaries as though they could last forever, but the Earth does not honor them. It shatters them with earthquakes, buries them in volcanic ash, drowns them under rising seas.

 

Long after we are gone, mountains will still rise, oceans will still close and open, and the continents will take new shapes. The world will remember us—not for the lines we drew, but for the marks we left in its stone. We are not separate from this restless planet. We are made of its minerals, its waters, its ancient dust. We live inside its story, carried forward on a tide of change that began before life itself, and will outlast us all.