The First Fires

For a long age after the beginning, the universe is dark — just gas, drifting and cooling and waiting. Then gravity does the patient thing it always does: it pulls. Knots of hydrogen gather, squeeze, and grow hot at the heart until, at last, light. The first stars burn in a universe that has never been lit. They live fast and die hard, and in their dying they forge the iron in your blood and the calcium in your teeth. You are made of dead stars. And the very first of them has left no grave we have ever found.