Once upon a time in the land of the living, there blossomed several beautiful minds. The proprietors of these minds generally felt disinclined to send them on crusades of the sciences or mathematics, which angered many a king and wizard. Day after day, the kings called to the beautiful minds’ purveyors for assistance with all sorts of things to which neither of the latter parties felt compelled to descend. The beautiful minds were much more content to spend their days dancing with the arts, making music and drawing forth words, which the earth appreciated; she showed her approval by being as beautiful as she could manage. Her plains and meadows grew gold and green, her waterfalls thundered through canyons and gullies, and her mountains cut into the clear sky like the teeth of a dangerous animal.

While the earth was busy being beautiful, the kings grew dissatisfied with the beautiful minds’ perceived delinquency, and appeared before them personally to demonstrate this. The beautiful minds were caught off guard when the kings swept up the minor poets in one hand and threw them beneath the crushing wheel of algebra. Sculptors went next, tossed carelessly over the cliff of physics. The abstract writers leapt after them, for the two were in mad, desperate love, and a second’s life without the other was a worse experience than any death the kings could bestow. String theory then took out the string musicians, having been tossed over the kings’ shoulders. Polynomial functions kicked in the direction of the brass musicians cleaved them clean in two. The novelists and oil painters fell before a firing squad of cellular biology. The kings sent all the wizards of the land chasing after the radical documentarians and passive-aggressive celebritarians, to strangle and beat them with inductive reasoning and radians, respectively.

On and on the beautiful minds were mown down in similar fashion, until the kings were sweaty and hideous, wading through a sea of the blood of the beautiful minds and their directors. Immediately the earth sensed a shift in the balance of humanity, and became sad. Deserts crept across and overtook her plains and meadows, quickly and silently as a thief in the night, and then the earth’s herds of animals had nowhere to stampede. Her waterfalls trickled down to nothing, and the forests surrounding them became starved for moisture; they shriveled and dried, and became prone to igniting and crumbling into acidic ash. The mountains which had once stabbed the sky in a triumph over gravity no longer had the energy to stand up even against wind, and were soon worn down to stubs of their former selves. The earth became sad, and soon neither equinox nor solstice had any effect upon her. She revolved on her axis as before, but when the sun rose behind her he did not see a vivid beauty. She was a dusty, dry, barren shadow of her former self.

The kings went about their business, building bridges, invading heathen nations, and crusading for logic and reason, perfectly on schedule, oblivious to the state of the world around them until their gilded boots crunched right through the earth’s crust. By then, of course, it was too late, because the earth could not be shaken from her state. She was so sad that she had become a literal shell; she’d become completely hollow. The bridges and castles the kings had built to celebrate their triumph against the beautiful minds were too heavy for her to support any longer, and began crashing through to the nothing underneath, smashing against the earth’s core, which, once molten and glowing, was now a dull, dead sphere.

And so the earth died.