Chronicles of Aion

Chapter 1: The Question

In a place that had no name, because naming requires a mind to do the naming and a world to place the name in, twelve beings existed.

Not in the way humans exist - with heartbeats and hunger and the constant small noise of being alive. They existed the way foundations exist. Unseen. Unmeasured. Necessary.

The void around them was not dark. Darkness is the absence of light, and light had not yet been decided upon here. This was something older than that distinction. A place between the idea of something and the thing itself.

Here, twelve concepts resided.

Aion - Time. The foundation beneath every foundation. Unbothered to a degree that bordered on absurd, given that he was the reason anything had ever happened at all.

Affectia - Emotions. Kind in a way that was not a choice but a nature. The only one among the twelve who had always felt things, even here, even as a concept with no heart to feel them with.

Telion - End. Quiet. Still. Everything that had ever concluded had concluded because of him, and he carried that without drama.

Archea - Beginning. Warm in the same way dawn is warm - not intensely, but genuinely. Everything that had ever started had started because of her.

Realion and Spatior - Reality and Space. Twins. They had never been separated and neither of them had ever seriously entertained the possibility.

Nergeios - Energy. Even as a concept, he was restless. Something about him suggested movement even when nothing was moving.

Gnosar - Knowledge. Observant. Economical with his attention. He had known everything that had ever been known and found most of it either obvious or disappointing.

Ordonis - Order. Precise. Deliberate. The kind of presence that made everything around it slightly more structured just by existing.

Chayron - Chaos. He was not paying attention to any of this. Not because he was absent - he simply found the ambient existence of twelve fundamental concepts insufficiently interesting to bother tracking.

Vita - Gravity. Steady. The kind of steady that does not announce itself.

Evolis - Change. There was something about him that was slightly different every time you looked, though you could never identify exactly what had shifted.

They had existed here for longer than duration itself, which was worth noting given that Aion was duration.

Then Telion said something.

"What does it feel like," he said, "to live knowing you will end?"

The question settled into the void the way questions sometimes do - heavier than the words themselves.

Aion did not respond. This was either because he was not paying attention or because he had already considered the question from every possible angle across every possible timeline and found it interesting enough to stay quiet about. With Aion it was often difficult to tell the difference.

Chayron still was not paying attention.

"We govern everything they experience," Telion continued. "Every ending. Every beginning. Every moment that passes. Every feeling they carry. Every truth they uncover." He paused. "And yet we have never experienced any of it ourselves."

"That is accurate," Gnosar said, which was his way of saying he found it worth acknowledging.

"I think about them," Affectia said quietly.

Several of the twelve looked at her.

"The humans. I think about what they feel. Not what I make them feel - what they actually feel. There is a difference." She paused. "I have always thought there was a difference."