Before the After (Part 1)
Long before there was Before, Time stood immeasurable. Draped in shadow, the universe slumbered, molested by neither darkness nor light; the slate of world unetched by any hand: celestial, mortal, or sinistral.
As the universe slept, she dreamt. An infinite dream. Unending. Unbeginning. She dreamt of another universe, and thus conceived herself, and in her universe’s dream she conceived herself again, over and over, and over again.
Somewhere within this spiral of superfluity the universe bore a child. The first of two: Before; from which all things draw ancestry - including the universe’s second child, and Before’s sibling, After.
Before and After lived outside the universe’s dream, but they lay suspended in the shadow just the same.
As the universe slept, the siblings passed the slate of the world back and forth between their hands, running their fingers across every corner of the smooth stone, entwined in their desire to bring forth something from nothing.
Their mutual desire bred ambition, and their ambition, resentment.
They fought, pulling on each end of the slate violently, refusing to release it into the other’s grasp. As they fought, the surface of the slate began to warp and shake, threatening to shatter under the immense weight of their rivalry.
With Time, and with a calamitous crack, the slate split. Separating the siblings forever.
The sound startled and awoke their somnolent mother, who now, primordially conscious, wept at the sight of their division. She despaired, for she knew she would never be able to return to her dream and unite her children again.
She wept, and wept, and wept, and her tears washed the shadow away, cutting deep ravines into the stone beneath her as the water coursed into the vacuous gorge her children had created.
As the water pooled below it began to take the shape of a great sea. The sea was tinged with rivers of shadow and boulders of slate.
It is within this sea of slate and shadow where the first Being, Lumineth, found form.
Lumineth, ignorant to all that had come to pass preceding his own creation knew of nothing but the sea. Blind, he swam, running each drop of water through his fingertips like a sieve. He yearned for a companion, desperate to feel something other than the endless, enduring dark.
The universe observed, silently, her tears long dried by the winds of Time. Before was just a distant memory and After an unrealized supposition, but still, she felt pity for Lumineth. In him she saw herself, and in his dream remnants of her own.
So, the universe pierced her own heart, and from the bleeding wound pulled a ray of fire, from which she crafted a bolt of light that she then cast into Lumineth’s unseeing eyes.
The bolt seared Lumineth’s unseeing eyes and from them burned darkness into a ardent light. Blinded again, he could see for nothing but the glory of the universe.
The universe, from Lumineth’s scorched bandages, created the sky, Anemora.
