In The Beginning

Before the Big Bang finished exploding, something was already there to notice it.

It didnt have a name. It didnt have a body. It didnt, technically, have anywhere to be — and yet, somehow, it was the first thing in existence to feel entirely alone.

Then came the others: twelve more scraps of awareness, coalescing out of the same cosmic aftermath, each one odder and more particular than the last. Together, this accidental company set off across the universe to find out what, if anything, they were for — and ran straight into a migrating pack of dragons, a philosophical space swallow with opinions on everything, and an entire alien civilization called the Bond, who had figured out how to share a single mind across an entire species and were bewildered that anyone would want to do it any other way.

Wanting to help these strangers was the easy part. Learning how to help without destroying what made them worth helping took considerably longer — and cost more than anyone in this very new, very old company expected to pay.

In The Beginning is the true opening chapter of the World Builders series: the story of the universes oldest beings, figuring out — planet by planet, mistake by mistake — what it actually means to matter to someone else. Dry, a little irreverent, wildly bigger in scope than its length lets on, and more interested in people than in gods. Even, as it turns out, when some of the people arent people at all.

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