In the beginning there was nothing. Not darkness, because darkness requires light to be the absence of. Not silence, because silence requires sound. Not emptiness, because emptiness requires space. There was nothing, and nothing had no name, and it needed none, because it was alone, and that which is alone never needs to introduce itself.
Ginnungagap.
The word came afterward, as words always do. Those who lived later named the hole that had existed before them and called it Ginnungagap, the yawning void. It yawned. Not like a mouth. Like an abyss.
In the north Niflheim formed. It did not come suddenly, because suddenly requires time, and time did not exist. Niflheim simply became. Ice. Mist. Water that had stood so long it had forgotten how to move. Cold in the way that kills without caring about it.
In the south Muspelheim formed. Fire and sparks and heat that burns rather than warms. In the heart of Muspelheim sat Surtr with his sword, waiting. He was waiting for the end even though nothing had begun. Surtr was the sort of bastard who buys funeral clothes before the child is born.
Between them: Ginnungagap. Still empty. But no longer alone. Now there was ice in the north and fire in the south, and the void felt the pull from both directions, and it was uncomfortable. It was the first time nothing felt something. Nothing did not like it.
The ice crept south. The fire crept north. They met. And in the meeting, in the exact moment when ice became water and fire became steam, the first shape dripped into being. Ymir. The primordial giant.
He was ugly. He was large in the way things are large when no one has decided how large things ought to be. He stank. He was hungry. And he was alone, but not for long, because out of the ice the cow Auðumbla licked herself free, a cow, big as a mountain, with four teats dripping milk, and Ymir drank, and Auðumbla licked salt from stones, and it was the first meal in history and it was exactly as inelegant as you would expect.
Then Ymir sweated. He fell asleep and sweated, and from the sweat under his arms new giants crawled forth, and from the sweat between his legs more crawled forth, and they were wet and naked and confused, and they did not know where they were, and that was fair, because no one knew where they were. There was no where. There was only Ginnungagap and a sweating giant and a cow.
And while Auðumbla licked the salt stones a shape appeared in the ice. First hair. Then a forehead. Then a face. Búri. The first god. Licked free from frozen rock by a cow, and if that sounds less dignified than the gods usually present themselves it is because it is.
Búri had a son. The son had three sons. Odin, Vili, Vé. And the three brothers looked at Ymir, the giant whose sweat had fathered their ancestors, and they decided to kill him.
They killed him. They cut him open. They used his flesh as earth, his blood as sea, his bones as mountains, his skull as sky. They took a giant's body and built a world from it, and they called it creation, and it was creation, but it was also butchery, and none of them ever spoke of it that way.
Ginnungagap was no longer empty. It was full of worlds built from flesh and bone and blood, and it smelled the way it smells when you butcher an animal, and that was how it began. Not with a plan. Not with a purpose. With sweat and meltwater and slaughter.
Then order came. But order is always the thing that comes afterward, when the mess needs an explanation.