Before the first stories learned to walk, before time’s old noise gathered itself into memory, the elders say there were the Lesser Ones, the early-laws of the newborn universe.

Forces without shape, without patience, without understanding. Gravity pulled too hard and crushed the young sparks. Heat fled too fast and left Matter shivering. Light scattered in every direction, a frightened animal with no den. Motion spun itself into knots. Mass argued with space over who belonged where, and neither ever won.

The universe was alive, yes. But it was a chorus of quarrels.

Into this noise came Arunai.

He was not born. He arrived, the way warmth arrives when two cold hands find each other. He stepped into the endless argument with the quiet of someone who had seen storms before and knew exactly how they ended.

Arunai gathered the Lesser Ones as a village elder gathers bickering children. Gravity sulked in the corner. Thermodynamics rattled with nerves. Entropy refused to sit. Light flickered from gold to white to blue in anxious little bursts.

Arunai didn’t scold. He didn’t command. He simply breathed.

And the Lesser Ones felt something new: a place between themselves and others. A space where their contradictions could rest instead of collide. Arunai placed Gravity beside Mass and whispered to one, then the other, teaching them how to lean instead of crush. He coaxed Energy to trust Matter long enough for the first warmth to hold still. He guided Motion into a dance instead of a tantrum.

He did not force harmony. He taught them strategy.

"Lean here, not there. Yield now, press later. Give what you can. Take what you must."

The universe steadied. Studied.

Colors began to keep their shapes. Stars dared to form. Heat learned when to stay and when to flee. And for the first time, the young cosmos felt something like possibility, a future not yet written but finally imaginable.

The elders say Arunai never asked for reverence. He walked from place to place, from starforge to dust-cloud, offering the same patient companionship to anything that trembled under its own nature. He was the first helper, the old village heart, the one who held everyone together not through power but through presence.

And so they tell us,

The universe did not begin with order, or logic, or even love. It began when Arunai showed the Lesser Ones how to treat one another.

Not with dominance. Not with perfection. Not with purity.

But with connection.

The breath shared between all things.