Less than a thousand years after the world first knit itself together, the land still wore its teeth. Primordial beasts grazed where cities would one day stand; rivers still remembered how to carve mountains. I moved among that hunger like something older than hunger itself, convinced that the secrets I sought... the secret of staying... were not buried but breathing under the same sun.
Then we found humans.
They looked like me at a glance, but time had been kinder to me in a way they could not see: my hands did not tremble with age, my thoughts could last as long as a season of stars. They had no songs for the things I had learned to whisper. They were, in the truest sense, small and clean and full of endings. Yet they chose me as teacher without ceremony. Maybe it was my stories, or the way I made the beasts' eggs hatch with a careful touch; maybe it was only that someone was finally listening.
For a while there was grace. We fed the young of the earth and watched them grow. The humans grew too... in muscle and in cleverness. But the world is patient in its cruelty. The Meta came like a new weather: men who had learned to bend metal and lightning into questions, who measured marrow and could tell the age of a world by the angle of dust. Their calculations called me primeval; their instruments called my years coeval with the stones.
They first crowned me in their mouths: god, relic, marvel. Then, when their instruments refused to simplify my motion into something tidy, they frightened easily. Curiosity curved into containment. The Meta who had once invited my tales invented tests and cages the way a smith invents a sharper blade. I taught; they studied. Centuries blurred. The hum of their machines and the bite of my patience grew tight as a rope.
The Meta wanted what we had made the humans into... longevity, the stubbornness of life itself. War was a blunt dialect. They cast steel and light; I cast what I had learned from scraping beasts' hide and the blood of my kin across bone as ink. I wrote a language on flesh: symbols that were not mere words but conduits. Each sigil fed upon the living vigor that birthed it. To speak them was to graft a new rib onto mortality.
We stood in two fires... their technology and our new rites. The humans, given my teaching, rose into something between their old frailty and my endurance. They won, at terrible price. The Meta retreated into shadow; we gathered the living and fled. I took to sleep, thinking to bury grief in the length of slumber.
When I opened my eyes again the world had forgotten my face. My name lived on in half-remembered rites and in the language I had bled into being. The Meta, patient as tide, were not gone. They had only learned to wait.