In the vast spaces between what was and what would become, THE Beholder drifted.
He was old. Not old in the way that Primordial Architects were old, those beings who had existed since THE First Cause produced differentiation and undifferentiation in its aftermath. Not old in the way that THE Creature was old, that defector from classifications who had witnessed THE Infinite Unfurling and everything that came after.
THE Beholder was old in ways that made such comparisons laughable, in ways that made the entire history of Observable Existence seem like a brief afternoon following an endless morning that most had forgotten ever occurred.
Many believed that there was THE First Cause, and then differentiation and undifferentiation bloomed to cause the emergence of Primordial Architects and countless other life forms. This was the accepted history. This was what beings taught their disciples and recorded in their archives and treated as the beginning of everything meaningful.
