Photo, Crumble and Net

"I'll begin, since I always do," said Photo, turning toward the fading light. "I take sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide out of the air, and I build them into living matter — sugar first, then everything a body is made from. Every leaf on this tree, every bit of the beetle that ate the leaf, traces back to me binding thin air and light into something solid enough to hold." Photo dimmed as the sun sank. "But here is the humbling part. If the matter I build never came back — if every leaf I made just piled up, locked forever — the world would run out of the raw stuff to build from. I can only keep beginning because the two of you keep returning what I began."

"That's my part," said Crumble from inside the log. "When a leaf or a log or a body finishes being alive, all the good matter Photo bound up is still there — carbon, nitrogen, minerals — just locked inside tough dead molecules. I release my enzymes and unlock them: I break the dead back down into simple, free nutrients the soil can hold again." Crumble sifted a little dark earth. "People think my work is the sad end of the ring. It isn't an end at all. I'm the turn. I take what looks like over and make it available. Without me, Photo's matter would stay trapped in the dead forever, and Net would have nothing to carry."

"And I carry," said Net, filaments spreading through the soil. "The nutrients Crumble frees would just sit in the dirt if no one moved them to where new life is reaching. So I thread through the soil, gather the freed minerals, and pass them into the roots of the living — the seedling in the shade, the new shoot, the growing tree that will make Photo's next leaves." Net's threads shivered. "I'm the bridge from returned to begun again. Crumble hands me the past, and I carry it forward into the future, and the future hands it to Photo, and Photo begins the whole ring once more."