In the beginning: Chaos
Before the Courts of Chaos, before Amber, before Shadows, there was Chaos. I’ve been thinking a lot about what Chaos was like before the Pattern sparked creation and brought the order of myriad worlds.
Often, when I think about ideas in relation to Amber, I look to Zelazny’s other works to help inform me. In this case, I’m taking inspiration from Lord Demon and Lord of Light.
I think of primordial Chaos as a lava lamp: streams of energy coursing and eddying. Where they crash together and intermix sometimes matter is created and occasionally that matter could be considered alive. Alive in the sense of an amoeba, really, but when you’re just starting out that is enough.
Now, Chaos is chaos: streams of energy are constantly crashing into each other and they do it so often that there are a lot of these little amoebas running around. Amoebas that have to adapt to the chaos surrounding them or be subsumed. Those that survive continue to adapt and probably learn to eat each other and, eventually, after an unfathomable period of time start to gain some level of sentience. These, then, are the first demons (so called by the Courts of Chaos).
The demons continue to evolve, of course, getting bigger and smarter until eventually they learn to consciously effect their environment and turn into the first proto-Chaos Lords. At which point, they begin altering their environment in earnest to create little pockets of stability and found what will eventually become the Courts.
But wait, we’re not finished because there is either some parallel evolution that happens or something else that leads to the existence of creatures like the Archetypes: the Unicorn and the Serpent.
From my point of view, the Unicorn and the Serpent are most likely really old demons that never joined the Courts. They just kept roaming around in the chaos eating smaller beings and becoming more and more powerful.
The alternative is that really old residents of the Courts eventually transform into Archetypes and that is a much scarier thought.