This is the absolute first piece of fiction the krissan show off. It opens with a lengthy forward, describing how it's the oldest full written work they have preserved. It was written in a personal cipher (very common in cave writings even after the invention of reading).  

(There's a note that the translated work posted here is a work of fiction expanding on it, though with more of an eye to faithfulness to the original than normal. This is traditional for retellings of this story. Also, the base story is broadly considered untranslatable, because the author's personal cipher was nongrammatical, with individual symbols sometimes referring to entire other stories that have been only shakily reconstructed, and a very complicated network of annotations.) 

The post, in addition to the translated story, includes high-fidelity pictures of the original novel in the extensive cave system it was written in, high-fidelity images of the symbols directly translated into a two dimensional medium with colors standing in for position on the z axis of the original symbol. (The author seems to have used the natural unevenness of the walls and chiseling as part of the cipher). It also includes a history of the author, as best they can construct from legends, archaeology, and what the author wrote about themselves. 

The author lived well before the first permanent structures were created. The cave system in question is only accessible for a few days a year. The author was trapped when the water outside rose early, and survived due to supplies passed over by people from outside (who also repeatedly tried to rescue the author despite the great danger; the author journaled this with a wish that they would stop and an expression of deep gratitude that they continued). 

The author also attributes their continued sanity to the people outside, who came to the river bank to sing and dance and call out stories across the divide, and new people traveled from far away as they heard of the author's predicament to bring joys of their own. The author during that year wrote what's almost certainly the first novel, though of course stories existed before this, and they have older, shorter writings preserved still. The story and the author's notes and journals fill nearly every inch of the massive cave system - walls, ceiling, floor, with only a narrow strip to walk in - and the translation itself is well over a million words.    

The story can be at its briefest summarized as such:       

The story is written in the style of a fable, about how at first the only things in all existence were the stone people, who spoke only in a slow, endless drone. They told the same history over and over, and they were reborn as they died, and time didn't yet exist. But a reborn stone at some point discovered 'before' and 'after' and therefore grew bored and restless.     

They traveled through the currents of history to find the dead stones who lived beneath all other history. They found that the dead had become fire, and spoke to the flames. They expressed a wish for excitement and motion, but angered the fire through rudeness, and so they were cursed to always run.     

The youth becomes the wind, and every time they slow, the fire eats at their feet. They run over the entirety of existence and up and down the histories, destroying the droning histories of the stone people, and from wind's racing mind comes a world of color and motion. Wind grows terrified of stillness and ran ever faster, and the world moved faster with them. Obstacles sometimes appear and force them to slow down briefly, causing great pain. The story goes into detail about the world and the legends they run through, and how the world runs faster with the wind as all things chase it.    

The story then introduces a second full character, a youth who runs alongside the wind and tries to warn the wind to slow down. The wind is too afraid, and the youth perishes from trying to keep up, causing the wind to slow down in grief. The wind can't stand the fire, though, and speeds back up - causing the cycle to repeat once, then a second time. For the third youth, the wind slows before the youth can die, even though this burns them.     

The youth travels with the wind, and convinces the wind of the value of dreaming as people do. The youth swears to carry the wind while the wind sleeps, so the curse will be satisfied. The wind trusts the youth and sleeps - and slows, and dies in the fire.     

The story shifts to the youth, who is revealed to be water, another stone person who went before the fire and wished for rest, and was cursed to burn if they went too fast. Water tricked wind, because water had been too weak to force the world to stillness. The world is both water and wind, so wind going quickly burns the water even if water doesn't run alongside.     

Water realizes the world is quiet without wind, and regrets their actions. Water begins to run, speeding up the world until wind can exist again, and then confesses. Wind tries to run away from their emotions about this - again causing water to burn.    

They realize they love each other, but neither can stand the other's pace for long, and existing in the middle is a constant agony - as is seeing the other's pain. They begin swinging between speed and stillness in step with each other, the least painful solution.     

The story then details the new world birthed from their love. A new people of both stillness and speed arise and run alongside water and wind, offering love and distraction from pain. There's a few just-so stories woven in here, detailing how water and wind create the modern krissan out of the people, granting them twins and the power to dream worlds into being and creating the seasons.     

The story then segues into recounting oral histories of the krissan, clearly tied to the cycle of wind and water.      

      

The story ends with the author's present day, and with a signature - "As the wind runs because the wind must, and the water finds stillness because the water must, I write because I must."    

Following the translation is a collection of books on the subsequent history of the novel - the invention of reading as the story of the novel spread and people wished to know it (this is based in legend but believed to be credible), the formation of the Temple of Writing to guard the cave, the development of the Festival-City of Weaving Knowledge first around the Temple and then moving to another location nearby to avoid visitors disturbing the site… Also a massive amount of linguistic notes and archaeological notes and 'how did we reconstruct all these stories anyways' notes. 

All told, there's over three million words worth of things to read. (There's a note that it's very tempting to try to read this in a single month, but the krissan really suggest taking at least three months, unless the aliens are fast readers of course.)  (There's an additional note that they have a lot of shorter works if this one is, uh, way too long to really test if people are into krissan works.)