The Mesa Shivers under Quibbins' Hand

Quibbins traces a titan mural in the Chaos Wastes and feels the mesa shiver beneath his hand. He has ducked under a rocky overhang for shade, high on a sun-baked mesa, and found the walls already painted, the pigment as cracked and ancient as the land. The oldest images show titanic figures shaping mountains and pouring out oceans as if the world were clay.

Then the greatest of them shatters the world, apparently by accident, and later drawings by other hands show him patching the pieces back together with fragments lifted from who knows where, while tiny figures scurry along the edges, perhaps the painters themselves. Quibbins touches one drawing, and the mesa shivers. He calls it a coincidence, probably.

Then he reads the murals again, not as a creation myth but as a warning that has survived the millennia intact: danger, construction zone.