He had always been. His memory, stretching like iron rails of a locomotive toward the heat-hazed horizon, was interminable. He had always been, at the beginning of all things, gazing into the breadth of eternity. Now in the present he struggled for a singular memory at the instant of his becoming, a memory he could quarantine and isolate from all others. A memory that marked the first moment. But always as he reached back through the recesses of his mind to recall his genesis each memory revealed to him its ancestor.

Into the trees, they walked. Heads down, kicking rocks like giants canvassing a vast geography. They spoke nothing, feeling the silence was the fragile bond that held them together.

Was this the street? So many years since, he, a frightened boy, so timid and uncertain, had stumbled into this cobbletone corridor, pushed along by the surging color and chaos of carnival. The shop half as narrow as its neighbors, and hidden beneath climbing vines of bougainvillea, had beckoned to him with the tinkle of small bells as he tripped, falling into the fragrant floral embrace of the shop’s front facade.

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making. Clive Barker ~ Weaveworld

In his hand he held the first breath of the universe, the initial urge, the finite moment from which the shadow of the infinite had seeped forth.