At the start, there were three. As always.
The three watched, the three waited, the three judged and reigned and brooded over a single little planet of a single little star, left all alone and drifting in a corner of the biggest, blackest sky that was everything.
Let us call them the three sisters, even though they are not. It’s simpler that way.
The three sisters watched that little planet, watched as it cooled from molten fragments of dust and screaming heat. They watched the impacts, the bombardments, they waded through the magma and endless winds of its birth and let them blow away as the years of the planet’s birth dripped farther into the past. The three brothers saw the first moisture, the first condensation, vapour, rains, and then the terrible storming floods that led to the seas and the oceans. The cold that turned the whole earth ice, they saw that too. And when it thawed, they saw the little bits and pieces that had stewed in the oceans for a time were getting bigger, swarming, multiplying, moving. They were strange; so small, but so many, and so determined.
First sister deemed them life. Ephemeral and feeble, but moving in a way that mindless matter did not. And they were worthy of watching for this reason.
Second sister deemed them changeable, ever-warping, ever-altering, forever seeking something they could never find. And they were worthy of watching for this reason.
Third sister made nothing fact, but watched all the same. And third sister was final, and that was how it should be.
So the three sisters watched the planet turn and its life move and grow, and they watched as great masses of rock and iron slammed into it and blasted life an inch from the endless. Over and over. Each time it was almost through, each time it scraped back with boundless tenacity. Cell by cell, it came up and up, and it grew in all ways, mental and physical, in size and complexity, in number and diversity. It lurked in every pool and every den, it was guided by tiny minds enshrined in miniature thrones of flesh. All crude, but all working.
And then one morning, the three sisters looked down and saw that life had found a new way to make things. They watched as a hairy creature of the near-plains chipped a rock to fit its hand, then attached it to a stick.
Using matter to serve mind, so deliberately? How interesting. Could they do that? They could do that. Why not?
First sister is first. That is first sister’s nature. First sister reached down, down, down, through the times and the spaces and the formless world-that-might-be and touched the little fleshy form of one of the near-plains things as it stood in a dark place, watching the sun disappear. Touched lightly, and softly, and shaped it. Matter to serve mind.
It worked, and first sister was pleased. Piles of stones were heaped at first sister’s direction, through her flesh-puppetry, and more matter was dismantled atop them, joint by joint and limb by limb, heaped higher. The piles of stones grew finer as the years grew on, and carvings were added to them with the many odd names they gave to first sister. First sister didn’t know what a name was, and didn’t care for them, only for their matter. Bodies. Bodies upon bodies hurled into piles for first sister inspection, to be shaped and made servile, and first sister made life take on forms it never would have dreamed of otherwise in its dull plod. Things made terrible music under the moon as first sister listened, and the night was a dangerous place wherever the bonfire lights of the stone-piles shone.
First sister watched, and was pleased, but first sister’s watching was only so long. As the time of life changed, it turned against first sister, and first sister’s stone piles became battling-grounds of life against life, where spear met flesh and bones were shattered. Years dropped away and so did first sister’s names, from hundreds, to dozens, to one lost and ancient shrine. And then that too was forgotten, and first sister watched a world that knew first sister no more.
After first sister, second sister watched too, and knew that first sister’s time was over and hers was dawning, as that is how things are. The three sisters – no, they are three brothers, yes, that will serve them – rearranged themselves, and second brother looked down at the things that first brother had shaped, now alone and wandering (some may live yet, in the sorriest corners of the darkest pits), all the old piles of stone abandoned and destroyed or hidden away. But the plains-apes were still shaping matter, still making minds real. And in a village in a wide swath of sand, second brother saw one change all the minds of all around him, using no tool, mind to mind without matter. This was worthy of work.
So second brother reached up, up from beneath the dead weighted dust of infinite distance and empty ages, and touched a mind, stripped it bare of its fleshy sheath, and showed it everything, then put it back.
The first one died. The third died. But many many primes later, second brother had shown itself to the mind of life that did not die, and placed it down among matter once more.
It told others, and they told others, and they told others. And that is how the little things that called themselves humans came to build new places for second brother – carving tunnels like worms, meeting in dark places, shedding light in caverns where it was never meant to gleam so carelessly. Their thoughts they held out to second brother like candies to their children, and second brother gave them new for old. Some lived, some died, none cared. They played flutes for second brother in those days. Strange piping things that whined and droned and seemed to spin in and out of hearing in a way that had nothing to do with pitch and everything to do with depth. Prayers were made that had no words, only screams, and fungi burned in braziers that set minds alight with frenzy.
But as second brother watched, time saw the world of life grow ever more filled with the purpose and tools of the humans. They fought one another as fiercely as ever they had under the eye of first brother, and with hate and fire came ingenuity great enough to shrink oceans under the steel keels of strange things upon the sea that were not fish, and roaring monsters that had iron where bone should suffice. The world filled up, and as it filled the ideas and thoughts of second brother became packed in tightly, confined to few minds, then fewer, then fewer yet until they were no more than bad dreams and errant scribblings in the most hidden journals of over-imaginative and susceptible poets. And second brother held no minds, and left no trace of what had been upon the planet, or beneath it.
After second brother, third brother – no, third, just third – third’s time was then, as the others retracted themselves from the little planet. It was how things were meant to be. Third is last, and third is finality, built on all that comes first and second.
Third bore witness to the great rock-and-mortar mounds of blood and congealed flesh that had been the work of first, and thought upon their empty, silent stones.
Third bore witness to the eldritch, lurid caverns of ghastly light that had been dreamed of by the mad minds of second, and thought upon the silence where gibbering had flown freely.
Third bore witness to the world-that-was, and knew that there were too many bodies and too many weapons to bring blood and sacrifices to its humans. Third knew there too many minds and too many moving mouths to hide in the corners, to whisper of forgotten madness.
Third bore witness, and third saw that vanity and pride was as weak and vulnerable as fear and careless thoughts, and third did not reach but MOVED, as humans might, and spoke using a mouth, and whispered words of air and matter that put seeds of mind and motion in the head of one architect, then another, and many more.
Third spoke of air and heights, and lofty perches that would be the envy of any eagle. There would be mirrored walls and steel-framed skeletons and monuments to the ingenuity and power of the peoples that made them, who would make of their dwellings darts to pierce the very sky they would span. Lies all, but pretty, oh so pretty, and the men with blueprints and charts followed them by the dozens and the scores, fighting over one another to build the highest, the next highest, then to best all the records and start over. Cities sprouted like mushrooms – upwards, reaching, grasping, straining up into the air. Men and women squinted their eyes over blurred heights that their instincts, made for trotting on near-savannah, were hapless to judge, and scrabbled nervously at their desks in offices a thousand feet above the ground. Air was piped in and treated specially at those thin heights, and the walls of the tall buildings whispered faintly with the winds that fought to tear the lofty places down. A tiny, artificial haven for humans that grew more artificial themselves; hollowed and scurrying and more and more nervous without knowing why, feeling lost and emptier as each day drained. The armour that gave those castles in the air false courage was glass-all-polished until it was as bright as mirrors, and their mirrors were as brilliant and soulless as the sky that they delved into ever farther, until they finally scraped its heights.
And when they reach there, just now, just a little past now, they will find third waiting for them.
After third? There is no after.
Third is last, and third is final.