Begin with Love & Death
“There once was …” properly begins a story about mortals because mortals have but once to act it. This story is about Immortals, Love and Death, born conjoined twins and hatched from a silver egg. That egg was the first full moon.
The Mother who spawned it and turned away from it, as the sea turtle turns away from her clutch, is spacious Night, she who begat it by beating her fierce Black Wings to raise the primal Wind. She opened her womb to Wind and thence delivered into darkness one fertilized egg.
Side note: Now Wind was to become in latter days a notorious breeder of bastard children*, but the Silver Egg story goes back before a beginning, a story so old it describes an unmeasurable age without dimension, before awareness, before the Pole Star pinned Sky in place and initiated directionality: North / South / East / West. The fabrication of a foursquare universe allowed Wind to arrive at his self-awareness and considerable horniness. Night gated her great womb. She abides and, then to now, she rolls out her barren eggs sequentially, moon after full moon. How fortunate for mortals. Imagine our misery if Love and Death had countless, similarly amoral siblings.
Side note: Now Wind was to become in latter days a notorious breeder of bastard children*, but the Silver Egg story goes back before a beginning, a story so old it describes an unmeasurable age without dimension, before awareness, before the Pole Star pinned Sky in place and initiated directionality: North / South / East / West. The fabrication of a foursquare universe allowed Wind to arrive at his self-awareness and considerable horniness. Night gated her great womb. She abides and, then to now, she rolls out her barren eggs sequentially, moon after full moon. How fortunate for mortals. Imagine our misery if Love and Death had countless, similarly amoral siblings.
This goes a ways toward explaining Love and Death, because basically they were born parentless. They swirled aimlessly for ages, interchangeable mass and energy, energy and mass, locked together and tumbling through inanimate spaces ruled by a monstrous, merciless hag. She may or may not be sister to Night. Nobody remembers. She is Entropy. Her rule is rule-less-ness.
Nobody quite has the story, but Entropy must have, in a careless moment, let it slip: about the inevitability of dissipation, about randomness and meaninglessness and the doomed trajectory of every particle away from every other particle until the universe goes dark. Light began with their mother, Night, and her finite supply of silver eggs. Eventually moons fail and everything ends.
Love and Death stirred in a way that worked contrary to the hag’s code, that defied Entropy’s iron law. In the beginning it began with a word, negated by a rejoining word.
Love: why
Death: why not
And to the absolute astonishment and dismay of Entropy, thus commenced the universe to crystallize, to accrete over, under, and around a minuscule speck.
