Adam knew not what to say, and thought on it for a while. “I cannot deny that I have with my own hands felled many trees of late, out of a desire to build a larger habitation for the little souls being spawned by Eve. Nor that the same actions carried out by thousands of my descendants—”

“Millions,” the angel put in.

“—would lay bare much Land that now is pleasantly forested. But to produce so many souls will take many years, and is it not possible we might change our ways in the meantime? We are not blind devourers. Already the souls of Eltown find ways to live comfortably while cutting down fewer trees.”

“That will only delay the inevitable,” said Messenger of El. “Fortunately, a simple fix, undertaken now, will prevent anything of the kind from ever occurring. It is the easiest thing in the world.” And the angel’s hand strayed to his right hip, where the pommel of a small knife gleamed as it protruded from a hidden sheath.

“What is the nature of this fix,” inquired Adam, “and in what way does it involve that knife?”

“Inborn to each of those twelve is the faculty of spawning more souls,” explained Messenger of El. “The males take after you in this respect, and the females take after Eve. The latter have their organs of reproduction deep inside, but you and the boys wear yours externally, where the mistake of Spring can be fixed by the smallest cut of a knife. No parts will be removed. It is merely the severing of an internal connection, quite nearly painless. While they are sleeping I will just see to it.” The angel turned back toward the door of the cabin, drawing the knife from its sheath. Its blade was scarcely larger than Adam’s fingernail and it gleamed white under the light of the stars.

Adam reached out and clapped a hand upon the other’s shoulder. “If it is all so quick and simple as you say,” he said, “then do you come back at some later time after Eve and I have had the opportunity to consider your proposal.”

“It is no proposal,” said the Angel, turning to face him and shrugging off his hand, “but a thing that is to be done, by order of El himself, this very night.”

“The writ of El does not run here,” said a third voice, and Adam turned to discover Walksfar approaching them across the clearing. “Camp may be small and mean to you who have come lately from the heights of the Palace, but it is old, founded in a place of wild souls by ones such as I who spawned in the age of the Old Gods and who looked upon Egdod himself with our own eyes. We did not invite El to the Land and we do not grant him the authority to send his minions into our dwellings and alter our forms with knives.”