Before time, even, there is death.

Science and the supernatural seem at odds on most occasions, but on this they agree: before the universe, there was another. Before time, there was death.

The universe and time were born alongside each other, one a shifting, malleable mass, the other a long and tangled ball of lines. Neither knew which was the other; they only knew of themselves. The mass expanded. The lines outstretched. They grew together, and yet apart; the goal of their lives is infinity, and it takes such a long while to achieve that.

The universe bore the gods, and the stars, and the galaxies; time bore consciousness, and language, and love. One cannot exist without the other. Not in the way that existence is.

Time is the first to notice its mortality. First, it notices the mortality of its constituents; the lines that end, whether short or long, whether thick or thin, whether meandering or straight, stop abruptly and do not continue, no matter how many lines go on without them. Next, it notices that all the lines end, eventually. It creeps out to the edges of its being, to the edges of the nearly infinite mass that surrounds it, and peers at the frayed ends of itself.

It wants to speak to the only other being it can, for the first time in its long existence, but it soon discovers the muteness of the universe. It finds that, in its near-infinity, the universe has resorted to huddling in the small parts of itself, where the worlds are not so loud and the stars are not so bright. The universe has not the luxury of knowing its own ending.

Perhaps it is not a luxury, time muses.

Death looks on, impartial, unending. Existence is not a word that applies to him – language is not something that can describe him. He is everywhere at once. He is the end of all things.

He is absolute.