First came fire
Second came light
Third came heat
Fourth came faith
Fifth carried words on his wings
Sixth brought sound
Seventh bore music
Eighth created praise
Ninth liked to dance
Tenth brought trepidation
Eleventh spoke knowledge
Twelfth spoke lies
And thirteenth spread faith
————
In the beginning there was nothing, and nothing was quite good enough.
So she fixed it.
That is the part they always get wrong — the historians, the prophets, the men who wrote it down in languages that couldn't hold the weight of what actually happened. They speak of darkness and void as though darkness were a problem to be solved. As though the void were empty. It wasn't empty. It was her. Waiting. Thinking. Deciding.
She does not rush.
She has never rushed.
The first thing she made was not light. That is perhaps the most persistent of the errors. Light was the second thing, and she made it because the first thing she made needed to be seen. You do not make something that magnificent and leave it in the dark.
The first thing she made was her daughter.
She thinks about this sometimes, in the long stretches between decisions. Whether she would do it differently. She always arrives at the same answer. No. She would not. The sequence was correct. The logic was sound. You begin with fire because fire is the foundation of everything that follows — of warmth, of light, of the long beautiful chain of consequence that becomes a universe. Fire does not question its purpose. Fire simply burns.
Her daughter burned magnificently.
She catalogues them sometimes, her children, the way a botanist might catalogue specimens — not coldly, she wants to be clear about that, not coldly at all, but precisely. Precision is a form of love. To name a thing correctly is to honour it. To understand a thing completely is to cherish it.
Her first daughter: fire. Temperature at creation, immeasurable. Disposition, singular. Hair like the moment before combustion. Eyes the colour of something that has not yet decided whether to warm or destroy. She came out screaming — not in distress, she checked, she always checks — but in the way that a star screams when it is born, which is to say with the full force of her existence announcing itself to the empty dark.
There, Mother had thought. There she is.
She had not expected the feeling that followed. She catalogues that too, in the interest of precision. A tightening. A recognition. The awareness that she had made something that was, in certain measurable ways, like looking into still water. The shape of herself, but burning. The mind of herself, but louder. The power of herself, distributed into a smaller vessel that would one day — the calculation was automatic, she cannot help calculating — grow.
She had held her daughter for a long time before she made the second one.
The second was easier. Light always is. Light is generous, light is diffuse, light fills whatever space it is given without complaint. She made him beautiful because light should be beautiful — that is its function, to illuminate, to attract, to make the dark inviting rather than threatening. She gave him a voice like the first morning and eyes that people would write songs about for the rest of recorded history, which is long, and she knew it would be long, and she chose to consider that a compliment.
He came out laughing.
She noted that too.
The third was heat. The fourth was faith. The fifth she gave wings because words need to travel, and she is practical above all things. The sixth, seventh, and eighth she made in quick succession during a period she remembers as particularly productive — sound, music, praise, each one feeding into the next, each one a refinement of the same idea, which is that she deserved to be heard. The ninth she made on a day she felt generous and gave him lightness in his bones that made him incapable of standing still, which she occasionally regrets but maintains was the right decision aesthetically.
The tenth she made because everything beautiful needs its counterweight.
The eleventh she made because she is not afraid of knowledge. She wants to be clear about that. She has never been afraid of knowledge. She made him with his questions already forming behind his teeth and she considered this a feature, not a flaw. Knowledge properly directed is a useful thing.
The twelfth she made by accident, which she does not admit to anyone, but precision demands honesty with oneself, and the truth is that she was tired by the twelfth, and tired hands make imprecise things, and imprecision in the architecture of a soul produces — she had checked his eyes afterward and seen it there, the thing she hadn't intended — misdirection. She had kept him anyway. Waste is not in her nature.
The thirteenth was different.
The thirteenth was not made in sequence. He was a decision made later, separately, after she had looked at what she'd built and understood what was missing. Not an archangel. Something else. Something she sent down. She does not discuss the thirteenth often because the thirteenth is a complicated topic and she prefers clarity.
She prefers most things to be clear.
Her children are largely clear. Their functions, their natures, their places in the order she built. She loves them. She wants that noted. She loves them the way a composer loves the instruments in an orchestra — specifically, appropriately, with full understanding of what each one is for.
It is her daughter she returns to, always.
Her first. Her fire.
She thinks about her with a particular quality of attention that she has never successfully catalogued, which bothers her, because she can catalogue everything else. The others she understands completely. Their needs, their weaknesses, their small rebellions, all of it legible, all of it manageable. But her daughter —
She thinks the word unruly and then sets it aside because it is not precise enough.
She thinks the word dangerous and sets that aside too because danger implies threat and she does not feel threatened. She has never felt threatened. She made the universe. She made fire itself. She does not feel —
The tightening again. The still water recognition.
She sets it aside.
There is a boy she has been considering. Not one of hers — or rather, one of hers in the sense that everything is hers, that the entire apparatus of existence emerged from her patience and her precision and her willingness to sit in the dark and decide. But not one of the thirteen. A new one. A correction, she has decided to call it, because she is honest with herself about what it is. An adjustment to an earlier model that did not perform as intended. She has run the calculations many times and the conclusion is always the same.
Her daughter needs something to hold onto.
Something to come home to.
Something that will keep her here, present, anchored to the world rather than burning above it where she cannot be — where it is difficult to —
She sets that aside too.
She makes the boy with careful hands. Not tired hands. She is very precise this time, very deliberate, building him layer by layer the way you build something meant to last. She gives him wit because her daughter respects wit. She gives him steadiness because her daughter has never had enough of it. She gives him a love so genuine it surprises even her in the making of it — she had not entirely planned for genuine, she had planned for convincing, but somewhere in the construction the thing became real, and she decides to count this as a success.
She gives him a name that means peace.
She gives him a soul that will find her daughter like water finds the lowest point — naturally, inevitably, without either of them quite understanding how it happened.
She sets him loose into the world.
Then she sits in the quiet that preceded everything, in the dark that was never empty, and she waits to see if this time her daughter will simply —
Stay.
She has always wanted what is best for her children.
She wants that noted.
She has always, in every decision, in every calculation, in every careful and precise act of love —
She has always wanted what is best.