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Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder aloud how the snowplow driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of the words. Yet there is the constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting, raveling nets of space-time on which a metaphorical finger can be put to indicate that here, here, is the point where it all began...
But it was much earlier even than that when most people forgot that the very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood. Later on they took the blood out to make the stories more acceptable to children, or at least to the people who had to read them to children rather than the children themselves (who, on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided it's being shed by the deserving*), and then wondered where the stories went.
And earlier still when something in the darkness of the deepest caves and gloomiest forests thought: what are they, these creatures? I will observe them...
And much, much earlier than that, when the Discworld was formed, drifting onward through space atop four elephants on the shell of the giant turtle, Great A'Tuin.
Possibly, as it moves, it gets tangled like a blind man in a cobwebbed house in those highly specialized little space-time strands that try to breed in every history they encounter, stretching them and breaking them and tugging them into new shapes.
Or possibly not, of course. The philosopher Didactylos has summed up an alternative hypothesis as "Things just happen. What the hell."
*That is to say, those who deserve to shed blood. Or possibly not. You never quite know with some kids.
A quotation from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather
....and the ominous Man Of Elephants stood atop the shell of the giant turtle with his elephants and watched out into space as he held his mallet of stone, with not a care in the universe. Until he slipped and fell through space and time.
And, which while he was falling, the dark and cold of the universe transformed his body into ice so cold it would never melt. And as he fell he thought about this. He thought about it for a long time. Then he stopped thinking about it. And he fell through the atmosphere of a planet, not knowing what it was. When he landed creatures found a crater and tried to pull him to a safe place. But he was much too heavy for that. So they went ahead and left him there and put food (an apple) next to him in case he woke up. He did in fact wake up. Then he ate the apple and fell back to sleep, thereafter he did not wake up for one hundred years, all because of the damned apple.
Finally after he woke up there was a city of the creatures that was built all around him. Knowing how immensely tall he was he thought he would stand up and walk right away. But as he stood he realized he had gotten so much smaller, or this world was extremely bigger, he was not sure. Either way he knew he was stuck, unless they had some sort of mechanism to let him fly through space back to Discworld. But he knew that was hopeless since such a thing wasn't even invented on his world.
So he walked around, completely cloaked in ice, and found a girl dressed in many colors. He asked her why, and she said, "I'm a hero. I can do what I want." And somehow made something appear over her head that looked something like this; :P . Though Man Of Elephants found this extremely weird he let it go and went ahead to another hero looking type, and found out that he needed to be trained to his next security level. Though he didn't know what that meant one bit, he found he powers got stronger, and he even got more powers. So now he just keeps doing it and doesn't worry about Discworld one bit.
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