They covered the landscape with their cities.

It was a society of continual expansion. The streets were lined with huge, sweeping, spiralling buildings of all shapes and sizes. Some were clusters of small, independent structures; each room of the house standing alone and separate. Others were towering monoliths, clawing their way towards the heavens. Nothing was complete; everything was continually growing and expanding, climbing higher and higher, wider and broader. Scaffold was as common as ordinary wall, and the figures of men crawled across the exteriors of the buildings like ants on a discarded apple. The society was dying.

Their growth had progressed from a creative pursuit to a cancer. They could not stop building. Their sprawling estates twisted and grew, and grew further. They built, and they grew, and they spread. They covered the landscape with their cities.

Until, one day, a young man appeared among them. He spoke of the vastness of the skies and the depths of the oceans. He told them of the myriad infinities to be found within a single leaf on a tree in a forest. He spoke to them, and they listened, and they stopped building. They yearned for the quiet solitude of a meadow in fall, for the busy hum of a pond in spring, insects and animals and trees all abuzz with life. They looked at the clouds and they looked at the oceans and they looked at their cities.

The flames were visible for miles.