There was gray, and then there was less gray, and then there was a sound that didn't belong to anything.
It took him — though him wasn't a word yet, wasn't anything yet, was just the nearest shape the sentence could bend around — an unmeasured length of time to understand that the sound was coming from inside whatever he currently was. A kind of low, continuous hum, like something enormous holding very still.
He didn't have eyes yet. He had awareness, which was worse, because awareness with nothing to look at just curls in on itself and studies its own edges, over and over, the way a tongue can't stop finding the same broken tooth.
He was small. That was the first true fact he ever learned about himself, and it took what might have been years to learn it: he was small, and folded, and rooted somehow into a colorless slope that didn't end in any direction he could sense. Something vast lived under his skin — he could feel it the way you feel a storm two days out, pressure without weather yet — and none of it was reachable. None of it was his to use. It simply sat there, coiled, humming, while the actual him stayed small and folded and silent on a hill that never once changed color.
No one came.
This is the part the story has to sit in honestly, because everything after only means anything if this part was real: no one came. Not on the first stretch of not-time, not on the second, not on whatever came after that stopped being countable in any unit a person would recognize. There was no warm brown eye watching him from somewhere close. There was no voice, low and certain, that returned to the same patch of hillside every day out of something that would one day be called love. There was the hum under his skin, and the gray, and the slow, humiliating work of learning that being alone wasn't a phase of his existence — it was, as far as the available evidence suggested, simply what his existence was going to be.
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He did not have the concept of unfair yet. He would, later. For now he only had the fact of it, pressing down on him the way weight presses on a shoot trying to reach light through soil that never planned on giving any.
What finally moved him — and moved is generous, it was closer to a shudder, a single reflexive twitch of whatever passed for a hand — wasn't hope. He didn't have that word either. It was closer to the storm under his skin finally, finally finding one inch of give in the ground holding it down, and taking it, the way water takes any crack it's offered, without meaning to, without wanting anything at all, simply because pressure goes where pressure can go.
Something in him tore free of the hillside — not violently, more like the last thread of a stitch finally giving — and for the first time in an unmeasured eternity, he was not rooted to anything.
He fell forward onto ground that felt, for one dizzying second, like it belonged to nobody. Which it did. Which was the entire problem, and also — though it would take a very long time and one very stubborn woman to teach him this — the entire opportunity.
He lay there, shapeless and shaking, and somewhere very far off, so far off it might as well have been a rumor of a sound rather than a sound, something like a footstep landed on ground that did not belong to nobody.
Somebody, somewhere, was walking.