One

Beginnings are like silences.

Beneath the thrum of the heart's beating, after all the zygotic sins have been committed, a stillness and a purity remains. A division of cells, the start of something delicious, something insignificant and human.

She didn't quite exist, yet. Although she had heard things -- soft murmurings of distances unimagined, rumbles of fretting and acidic dulcet symphonies -- she comprehended nothing, and could not have been born into any color named by any mortal's language.

What she was involved only energies....quiet flumes of life-force, somehow branded by time to appear at a specific moment in the future. But she knew nothing of this. She halved herself, and again, and yet again, spiralling through the pentacle she was, all the while knowing absolutely nothing at all of the effects she might have upon her surroundings -- or, indeed, what those surroundings were. The heat of her, the sense of her, the electricity that coursed through those divisions of being....she felt none of it, defied the meaning of the changes by simple non-being.

She would become a flame, and something far more precious would come. But that was for later.