The First Poisoning

The oceans are burning, and nothing alive knows why.

Not fire — not the kind you'd recognise. What you are watching is rust. Slow, planetary, unstoppable rust. The water around you has been turning a deep, bloody red for longer than any creature can remember, and the sky above — which has always been a soft, safe orange — is filling with something new. Something wrong. A colourless gas leaking out of the shallows where tiny green things have been quietly eating sunlight for a hundred million years.

Oxygen.

To everything alive in this ocean, it is what arsenic is to you. It shreds the chemistry of cells that have never needed it, never prepared for it, never imagined it. The dying takes millions of years, which means it takes forever, which means it never stops. Iron rusts out of the oceans and falls to the seafloor in thick red bands — bands we can still read today like a slow catastrophe written in stone.

Almost everything that has ever lived on Earth dies in this poisoning.

Almost.

A few things, by accident of chemistry, can survive the new gas. More than survive. They can use it. And the world those survivors will eventually build — every lung, every fire, every breath you are taking right now — runs on the waste product of a massacre so old it has no witnesses.

You are made of the poison.