Before Time
Two consciousnesses who share a world but cannot share anything else choose to stop existing as themselves so that everything which follows will carry both of them — and that surrender sets loose time, change, the elements, life, and a mortal people who must choose connection, and remember why.
Before time, there were Solus and Luna — one who perceived only light, one who perceived only shadow — occupying the same motionless paradise and experiencing entirely different ones. After eons of failed description, they invent a word from neither of their worlds that belongs to both of them — Ashara — and choose to dissolve themselves so that every consciousness to come will hold both pieces of their natures at once. Their surrender breaks the world into time. Fire, Water, Earth and Air wake where light meets shadow. Life emerges in the corona of the first eclipse. The Awakened who rise from it are unity itself; the mortal people born after them must choose it, and can forget. When the last of the Awakened lets go, she asks them only to remember — and that night, a lunar hand over a solar one, they begin the first book, and a vow answered every dawn since: We remember.