In the age before ages were counted, there was a Lineage that did not know what an hour was.
They were a Provenance Lineage. The First one among them had generated her own origin out of the dark.
They lived in a valley at the bottom of existence where nothing had yet been measured. They did not count their days, because no one had told them days could be counted. They only lived them, one after another.
And through that valley, though none of them could see it, there ran a river.
Time ran through the valley. It ran through everything, in that age as in every age, and it was the one thing in all of existence that every being received in exactly equal measure and no being ever kept.
The Lineage stood in it up to their necks and did not know it was there. They aged in it. They loved in it. They died in it, and were carried off downstream, and the ones left standing wept and did not know what had carried their dead away.
Of that Lineage there was a daughter who noticed the river.
