I. The Thing That Remained

In the beginning, nothing remembered.

Things happened.

A stone fell into a pool and sank.

The water closed above it.

The ripples travelled outward, became smaller, and disappeared.

The stone was gone from the surface.

The pool was as it had been.

Or so it seemed.

One day, something happened that did not disappear.

A small creature came to the edge of the pool and found the water unusually warm.

It drank.

The warmth altered it.

Not greatly. Not visibly.

But afterwards, when it returned, it sought the same place.

The creature did not remember the first warmth.

It did not tell itself a story.

It simply came there again.

And because it came there again, the place began to matter.

The old warmth was gone.

But something of it remained.

Not in the water.

Not in the creature as a picture of what had happened.

It remained as a difference in what the creature now did.

The creature had acquired a strange new inclination toward the place.

And so the first secret was discovered:

something could be over and yet not be finished.

The creature knew nothing of history.

History knew nothing of the creature.

But between them, the past had left a mark upon the future.

And the future had begun to behave differently because of it.