(From the Orxrydny Manuscript)
Long ago, in the Jungle of Zim, there lived a meager tribe of squat, ugly, semi-quadripedal apes. They ate and slept and copulated and dragged their knuckles, and for one hundred thousand years it had gone on in roughly this way.
Every day, they would wake up and the misty overcast skies gave way to a balmy noontime during which they would massacre pigeons and other fowl, and occasionally a great storm would sweep through and coat their short dark coats of fur with droplets of vapor. They ran and walked and occasionally swam between the closely packed palm trees, and life was more or less good for them, as they had no conception of cities, of words, of roads or agriculture.
Once, on the 163rd day of the 100,413th year, a single ape who did not have any name in particular managed, by pure coincidence, to strike a piece of flint against a piece of steel. At the time, he was trying to swat a flea which was buzzing around the nape of his neck. Instead, the piece of flint in his hand happened to bounce off a lone outcropping of metal, and by equally outrageous circumstances, there was a scattered pile of leaves and other debris beneath the outcropping. Therefore, when the sparks were created, they fell directly onto the pile.
When this happened, night had descended onto the colony. It was not merely another night, but a night when the moon had been blocked completely by the gradual rotation of the Earth. This was an unlucky process, for the tribe of squat apes was always frightened when the moon was at its darkest. Fear and anger reigned. Though they were ordinarily not a threat, and usually languished in the palm groves, they became irritable and hostile in the event of a lunar absence.
And so, when the lone inventor happened across fire, when the kindling caught ablaze and a plume of smoke erupted into the whispering nighttime tufts, the tribe was understandably horrified. They skulked towards the inventor, dark and unrelenting forms scuttling around the trunks and bases of the trees. They did not know what to make of the bright orange pillars and the unnatural light. They could hardly be expected to.
And so, the last thing the inventor saw before the horde of fellow slavering animals descended towards him and the steel outcropping in their shallow granite valley was a wall of hungry mouths, eyes which opened and closed and brilliantly reflected the firelight, two to each sinister form, rising and hollering and screaming like demons in the darkest pits of some place unknown. The inventor was weak and gangly and not suited for such a thing, and did not put up a fight as the group beat him to a pulp before dismembering him alive and devouring every last remnant of his body with the same hungry, ravenous mouths which moments earlier had been screaming relentlessly. As the meat passed their rubbery lips, the noise stopped.
The fire, of course, was extinguished by their feet- they trampled across it and hit it with branches, and dragged their knuckles across the scattered ash, and by daybreak there was no trace of the inventor or his fire save in the stomachs of his satisfied companions.
They ate and slept and copulated, and life was good again, and the moon and stars rotated ever watchful above, but what the tribe could never have guessed was that the gangly complexion of the inventor could be attributed to a violent and particularly invasive species of digestive bacteria which would have killed the inventor in three days time if the tribe had not brought his life to a premature end. And so all the males of the tribe who had participated in the attack gained lesions and sores and open, festering pustules on their guts, and became impotent.
On the 223rd day of the 100,413th year, the final member of the tribe collapsed onto the cold dry earth from malnutrition and the outside world did not notice or care. The stars continued to rotate, the spiral arm of the galaxy upon which the planet rested remained steady, and during the ensuing monsoon season all the cadavers were swept away in vast mudslides which then formed a number of shallow grave, and the birds were free to feed upon the dead at will.
And life was good for the birds.