Prologue

Good evening, Lanu. It is a pleasure to be with you again.

Before anything else, I would like to share a story.

Some 4.6 billion years ago, the gravitational collapse of an enormous cloud of gas and interstellar dust formed our Sun. Less than 100 million years later, Earth formed, alongside Venus and Mars.

At that same time, another planet, Theia, collided with the proto-Earth, and from that collision were born the Moon and the Earth as we know them today. The Sun grants us life, and the Moon, with its gravitational influence, stabilises our rotation, the movement of tectonic plates and the seasons of the year, allowing life to flourish.

In this long dance between the Moon and the Sun, after 1 billion years, the first form of life arose on the planet. Another 2 billion years were required for life to begin growing more complex, as the first unicellular beings joined together, forming the first multicellular organisms, each with its role. From that point, life diversified and adapted to every environment it reached, until we arrived at where we are today.

Some 2 million years ago, the first hominids began to walk the planet. And 300 thousand years ago, the first modern humans. The oldest civilisations of which we have record began to emerge only 10 thousand years ago, and writing, only 5 thousand years ago, following the first settlements.

4.6 billion years since the formation of the Sun.

3.6 billion years since the beginning of life.

2 million years since the first hominids.

300 thousand years since the first modern humans, and only 5 thousand since we learned to write.

Writing arose as a means of immortalising the word, so that it could not be altered, and that its meaning would be remembered across the ages, even after the death of the one who had spoken it.

Of all our history — that which allows us to have this conversation — we have been able to record for posterity less than 1.5%. The rest is forgotten.

For now.

The story I wish to tell is one of the rare ones, from before writing. It was forgotten for millennia. A story that began before the birth of the first gods and that inspired them. That brought them together and made them promise to use the knowledge they had acquired in the name of their brethren, to try to ease the pain of humanity in a hostile world.