They say there was a world before ours,
Grown weary beneath its years.
So the Three drew the curtains of flame,
And bade the old world sleep.

For three days, the world had lain beneath a silence too complete to be called peace. No birds crossed the white sky. No insects troubled the black seams between stones. Rivers moved sluggishly beneath skins of grey, carrying soot toward seas whose names had already been forgotten. Wherever men drove spades into the earth, they struck walls no living mason remembered raising, stairways descending into rooms without doors, and pieces of coloured glass melted into shapes that resembled eyes.

The Three had burned the old tapestry and drawn another over its frame. That was what the priests taught: that which belonged to the former world had been given to the flame, while what belonged to the new had only just begun to take shape beneath their hands. Nothing was meant to remain between one weaving and the next; yet, something beneath the ash breathed.

The labourers heard it first: a small, wet sound beneath the settling dust. They dropped their tools and fled, believing some remnant of the old world had crawled upward to claim them. Only an old woman remained, moving through the ruins with her head bowed, gathering the rusted nails one by one and letting their small, dull clatter disappear into the folds of her apron. When the ash stirred and rose upward, she sank to her knees; beneath the blackened earth, a slow heat still lingered, rising through the dust and into her palms as she dug.

Then a hand emerged, five tiny fingers opening against the colourless morning, and the woman dug faster. Beneath the ash lay an infant, naked and unburned; no blister marked her skin; no soot darkened the inside of her mouth. Her pale hair was damp against her skull, though there was no water nearby, and her eyes were already open. Around one wrist, a red thread had been tied three times.

She carried her beneath her cloak to the First Court. They searched for a mother until evening, then for three days, then for twenty-seven. No woman claimed her. No bloodline answered, and no surviving register contained her birth.

The physicians listened to her lungs and found them clear. The priests washed her in cedar water and waited for an omen, but none came. The council burned incense until the chamber became blue with smoke. Still, nothing spoke. In time, the silence grew so unbearable that they began to give it a meaning of their own.

They called the child Junon. Later, they called her the Child of Ash, and later still, the First-Born of the Rewoven Age. They said the fire had spared her so humanity would understand that destruction was not an ending. They said the Three had placed her beneath the ash as a promise. They said she had been born from the new earth without mother nor father, the first daughter of a world remade clean.

The old woman who had found her lived long enough to hear every version. People came to her house carrying wine and offerings, asking what she had seen in the ruins. Had there been light? A voice? Three shadows standing over the child?

The old woman always gave them the same answer, “I found a baby.”

When they pressed her, disappointed by the plainness of it, she would return to whatever work occupied her hands.