In the Beginning

In the beginning there was innocence. A sense of ease and joy to the days. Lightness passed smoothly into darkness and sleep was deep and replenishing. This was before my time.

By the time I came around, this was just an origin story. A story that seemed improbable in the face of our reality. A reality where evil met ignorance and begot pain and suffering. Where the light of day burned our skin to blisters and then we shivered through the cold darkness of night. When brothers and sisters warred against each other and death was the only peace.

This was before your time. Before the Great Pause that stopped the clocks just past the hour of noon. The pause where we no longer begin or end. We just suspend. It is in this pause that your story begins.

You’re one of thirteen that we know of. Those that were born into the world at the very instant the Great Pause begun. With each of you, you brought us along. Your mothers. We were still linked by the umbilical cords of life. That is why, we think, we were reborn into the pause while so many others were not. That makes us twenty-six. Twenty-six souls who navigate through the frozen world awaiting an awakening that is uncertain. But we are not alone. For, for every being frozen in time, whether human or beast, their shadows were born into the pause. The Shadows outnumber us by multitudes. Some whole, reborn at just the right moment when the sun cast them in the full. Most, only bits and pieces of their original form — deformed by circumstance. All of them haunting and hungry.

Be well,

Monty