Thus for a time he extended the Land and the forest vastly in whatsoever direction he chose to fly. It became monotonous, though, and the river draining it grew so wide that when he lit on one of its banks he could not see to the other side. Summoning more vague memories of how things ought to be, he put an ocean at the river’s end. Because there was some indefinable wrongness in the forest’s going all the way to the water’s edge, he made between them a strip of bare adamant. The monotony of this displeased him and so he broke it up into various pieces called rocks. His first rocks were all of a common shape and size but he bettered them by making some tinier and more numerous than snowflakes, others bigger than the hill of the park but less often seen. Distributed along the boundary between the forest and the ocean, these made beaches and cliffs, which protected the trees from the onslaught of the waves with which he thought it best to populate the surface of the sea. He soared and wheeled above the largest of all the rocks, which, just to amuse himself, he had made so large that the street and the park and much of the forest could have rested comfortably on its top. From its apex he beheld the way his waves crashed against it.

In the water’s movements he saw manifold imperfections. The waves and the manner of their beating against the rock begged for improvement. He spent some days bettering this, until when they clashed against the rock they hurled spray into the air. When he swooped low he could feel spray pelting the skin he had made to separate himself from things-that-were-not-Egdod, and the waves’ roar enveloped him almost as fully as the hiss of chaos had once done eons ago. The spray was made of tiny, hurtling balls of water that were all but invisible against the sky. He knew that this was wrong and that each ball of water ought to catch the light of the sun and reflect it, making the spray glitter brightly. More than that, each ball ought to be supplying a reflection of the world around it—including Egdod. Until they did so, the water was very far from being rightly formed and needed further betterment.