The workings of gods had left the small tribe of the Altai roaming the steppes, in the beginning of the world.

Twenty people that became a hundred over the years, and then fifty when the gelid winter came.

Thatched huts, warm blood, the sun rising between the mountains. Hunting the small rabbit, dancing while intoxicated in soma.

They seldom talked; language was still a luxurious commodity, and silence was so much more plentiful. They liked to hear the plains when washed by the rains, and the trees falling and toppling over with the tempests.

They liked to be together gathered in long embraces. They were the only creatures they knew as them: the long legs, the sad eyes, the placid gaze. And so each one felt the others like they felt themselves, and every night in the cold they suffered the other's fears, and cried.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The world was new, and they roamed the vast steppes, traversed solitary mountains, wet their feet at neverfound rivers.

And when they invented the Name, it was a night like every other, except it was in the high of the winter, or the spring. And it was atop a nameless mountain, or at the beaches of a cold river. 

The Name was uttered by the winds to the Altai whistling in the mountain, or by the water and the rocks by the river.

I don't remember very well, as I was asleep and now I'm old. Old and older than these rivers from now, where your countrymen wash their feet and call themselves the Merban. Older than your cities and your Emperors of lore. Older than your language and your pilgrims, and your mages or you tales.

And the Altai, they are older than your magic, as they were born at the beggining of the world, and traversed the nameless steppes, to discover the Name, where all things come to be.