[original fiction, 10k words (this chapter), idthink this needs any content warnings though they do walk along the edge of a very deep shaft for a bit at one point]
1. The Door
You do not understand time as I do. It is possible that you are reading these words many thousands of years before I write them; that I write further in your future, as you reckon such things, than any text you regard as ancient lies in your past. Some of those who lived in the times between ours coined the term 'incient', the inverse of ancient, for texts from my time or later. I am personally of the belief that this began as a lazy joke, with which my language is now sadly burdened.
It is also possible that you read this many thousands of years in my future, but if that is the case I can do less to accommodate your understanding. We may differ in our understandings of the asymmetry of time, but my one privilege, in the scale of the history I can describe, is the absolute certainty that time is asymmetry. Though I or my words might visit your time I cannot grasp it as I would any point in my past.
Whatever temporal distance lies between us, know this: I have touched an anciency that dwarfs it. Our universe is old. It was old beyond comprehension even when the tree of life we share as origin took root. The world that was our cradle is, as I write this, four and a half billion years old. I am reasonably confident that this is as true for you, in your time, as it is for me now. To my knowledge, no member of my species is born at a time at which that world was noticeably more or less than four and a half billion years old.
But our lost homeworld – of which you may nevertheless be a resident – was not an early riser at the dawn of the universe. Planet formation predates even the sun around which that world orbited by about twice our homeworld's age. In my time we know little of such life as those older worlds may have nurtured.
That they nurtured life, however, is now beyond my capacity to doubt.
