Begin with Love & Death
“There once was …” properly begins a drama about mortals because mortals have but one act to live. This narrative tells about Immortals, Love and Death, conjoined twins 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 who blindly and without consciousness deposited his seed. Thence Night delivered into darkness one fertilized egg.
The Silver Egg episode is but a story fragment from before the known world, back before any beginning, a scrap of rumor left us from an immensurable age without dimensions.
At the first full moon Night gated her womb, and time commenced. Then to now, Night abides. Then to now, sequentially — full moon after full moon — Night unlatches the gate and rolls out a single barren egg.
How fortunate for mortals, that barrenness. Imagine our misery if Love and Death had countless, similarly amoral siblings.
Having been conjured, Wind would awaken, would become in latter days a notorious breeder of bastard children. Origin stories tell how the Pole Star pinned sky in place and initiated directionality — North / South / East / West — fabricating a foursquare land over which Wind quartered himself and indulged his lust. He blew airy seed up the horny hindquarters of mares, ewes, vultures, assorted poultry, and once in ancient India, a dreaming Tigress. Even today, descendants of Wind’s offspring fill the world with the odd and the misconceived.
Freshly hatched, Love and Death swirled about, 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 Auntie Enty must have, in a careless moment, let it slip so the children overheard — about the inevitability of dissipation, about randomness and meaninglessness and the doomed trajectory of every particle away from every other particle until the whole of the all evaporates.
Love and Death startled at the news. The infants blurted their first words.
—Why— said Love with a voice as cold as the void at absolute zero.
—Why Not— sighed Death, boney heart clacking with ardency.
They each looked at the other (also a first) and encountered — surprise! another child! Who was this other child?
—Me— said Love.
—Not Me— murmured Death.
Thus did Night’s oppositional offspring invent duality. Makes sense, really, for twins to pioneer like and unlike. How else to tell one from the other. How else to tell something from nothing — crumbs and motes of untidy somethings swarming throughout Auntie Enty’s abyssal nothing. As Night was a neglectful mother, so Entropy was a neglectful housekeeper. It’s a wonder the children made it at all.
But these newest Immortals flourished. Simultaneous with the twins’ moment of discernment, two of Entropy’s random, swarming motes bumped, accidentally aligned, and nucleated. Synchronicity. The germ of our universe formed.