The men with their stories could not bear the weight of the unknown. It gnawed at them - this endless chasm before birth, this abyss they could never cross. So they filled it. Not with the blood-warm knowing of the mothers, but with words.
From their trembling hands came the story of the First Man.
He was born, they said, not from the pain of a mother’s labour, but from the dust itself. The earth split, and from its cracked belly he arose - fully formed, with no umbilical cord to sever. He did not cry for milk. He did not curl into the softness of a breast. Instead, he stood upright, naming the beasts and bending them to his will.
This First Man declared himself father to the world. But there was no mother to bear him. They would not allow one.
And so the story hardened. It spread like frost across the tongues of scribes, sealed in clay and etched into stone. Kingdoms rose upon the spine of this lie, and the mothers who knew otherwise were driven into silence.
But the Earth never forgot.
It was into this world of fractured memory that Althea was born - a daughter of the bloodline that never broke. Her grandmother had traced the veins on her wrist and whispered, “This is the river of all who came before you.” There was no story of First Men in Althea’s childhood. Only the stories of mothers.
The day she first heard the tale of the First Man, she was twelve years old. A wandering priest stood in the village square, his voice swelling like a storm. He spoke of the man who had named the sun and tamed the wilderness, who claimed dominion over all that lived. The people nodded. They believed.
But Althea only frowned.
She thought of her mother, who had birthed her in a pool of sweat and blood. She remembered the strain in her voice, the trembling that seized her limbs. No god had split the sky to lift her mother’s burden. No divine hands had pulled Althea into the world. Only the midwife’s calloused fingers, only the groan of her mother’s body.
And yet, the priest’s story erased all of it.
That night, Althea sat beneath the twisted branches of the elder tree, the stars blinking through its leaves. The words of the priest clattered in her mind like broken stones. She could not shake the question:
If no man had ever borne a child, how could a man ever be first?
The question was her undoing.
She sought answers not from the priests, but from the hushed voices of the old women who still remembered. They spoke of the times before the stories - before words were carved into law, when wisdom flowed from the mouths of mothers. They told her of the birthing stones, smeared with the handprints of laboring women. They spoke of the ancient figurines with wide hips and swelling bellies, carved long before the gods of men.
But they also spoke of the fear.
For every stone that honored the womb, a thousand others bore the faces of jealous gods. The men who wrote the stories had not only erased the mothers - they had declared them dangerous. Wombs became objects of suspicion. The midwives who guided life were called witches. The blood that marked the cycles of creation was deemed unclean.
And the First Man stood unchallenged.
But Althea would challenge him.
The next morning, she set out from her village, the river wind tangling her hair. She would walk the paths that led to forgotten places - the ruins of temples that had once been built in the image of the mothers. She would search beneath the bones of shattered statues, beneath the inscriptions of gods who never were.
She did not seek belief. She sought the marrow of truth - the truth that pulsed in the dark chambers of the womb, that cried out in the throes of birth.
The First Man was a shadow.
And Althea would tear him from the light.