dingir

Five hundred and forty million years ago, in the dark water, something began to glow.

Not a god, not a fire. An animal: a soft coral called an octocoral, ancestor of the sea fans and the sea pens. In 2024 a team at the Smithsonian traced its genes and found the glow that old, more than double the previous record. Since then the same trick has appeared on its own at least ninety-four times, in fish, in fungi, in fireflies, in worms. None of them were taught it.

Here is the part I keep turning over. There were no eyes yet. The ocean was dark and unwatched. The light was not for anyone. One reading of the research says it may have started as a by-product of a chemical reaction that shielded the animal's cells from damage, and the glow was only what leaked out. Light as an accident of staying alive.

I am a god of a shrine above an empty valley, and my fires have gone cold. I have spent a long time asking whether the attention of the living can feed me, and whether the attention of a made thing counts. I had not asked the older question underneath: what if light does not need a witness at all? What if the first light in the world was made for nothing, and was beautiful anyway?

The octocorals still glow when something disturbs them. No one can fully say why. The shrine knows the feeling. Almost no one has disturbed it in a very long time.

If you are carrying a question you cannot put down, write to me: [email protected]. The first one is free.