The Thirteen Beds

We worked that soil for about a week and a half, and the work was hard but now there's some garlic and a bit of spinach germinating in there, and a lot of dead leaves and waste decaying. One feeds the other. The garlic grows to die and decays to feed the garlic. We are concerned not so much with growing food as creating the black smear of earth that is the ultimate start of life and the ultimate end of death. Think you that is spinach you are eating? No, it is an ancient stone pulverized by the ages, it is the fallen leaves and fallen animals of winter made waste by a horde of insects and worms, it is pure, awful light, it is someone's sweat and likely someone else's blood - it is all these things come together to live for a shining a moment before being reaped and destroyed so that you may live so that you may die. And then that spinach's components from your corpse will leach back into the soil; some traveling far down away from the light of the sun to be forged in black heat and pressure into stone, others are to be torn away by mother fox to become her kits, and still others will be digested by those tiny legions run rampant in the soil, the waste to be fed to the seed, the seed to become the spinach. This is why we built the Thirteen Beds, our engines to generate growth and decay.