Before the Titans

a YA novel


At the start of time, in the beginning of all things—before there were words, even—there were Ge and Uranus.

 

For almost as long as they knew, all they knew were each other.

 

As you can imagine, it was not a very exciting existence.

 

Every so often, Uranus would become conscious of Ge’s presence, he would acknowledge her, she would politely respond, and then they would go back to doing their own thing.

 

Which really wasn’t very much, to be truthful. Ge did a lot of floating around, while Uranus spent most of his time hovering.

 

Ge is what we came to know as earth, but because there were no words for it then, she was only known as Ge. Or actually, she was not known as Ge then, either. She simply was.

 

Suffice it to say, Ge had most of the qualities we know the earth as having. Well, no, that is not entirely true, either. She was solid rock, but little more than that.

 

Nonetheless, the fact that she was at least substantive was something she certainly would not let Uranus forget. In fact, it was what made her feel distinctly superior to her husband.

 

You see, Uranus is what we know as the heavens—or, more precisely in this scientific age—the sky. And the sky, Ge said, was “just a vast bunch of nothing.”

 

Ge and Uranus were married, but not because they wanted to be. They were, by definition, two parts of a whole, two halves that required each other to even be considered existent. Imagine an earth without an ending, and you have a boundless universe of solid rock. Imagine a sky touching nothing solid, and you have a universe of pure emptiness.

 

Do you see how hard it is to describe these things?