Prologue: Birth of Aia
It was a time when darkness and emptiness yearned for light and matter on an almost conscious level. Circa twenty billion years ago, the entire universe was comprised of merely twelve galaxies. The nature of the initial spark which gave birth to existence is still now and will forever be a mystery. But the twelve spiral galaxies that offered the tiniest glow in the infinite abyss around them, were filled with more organic life and other cosmic wonders than any celestial body in existence today.
In the brightest corner of creation, amidst the brutal demise of a nameless solar system, Aia was born. Ironically, the destruction of the most abundant source of life in the universe during its time, led to the birth of the most powerful and intelligent sentient being in all of history. It was on that day that a main sequence star with an incredibly unique molecular composition, exploded; leaving ten populated worlds dead in its wake. Days after the super nova, the region was still littered with the dust and rubble left behind by shattered planets, moons and countless asteroids. But in the center of the massive swirl of gray and black, a lonely light flickered against the hauntingly blank canvas.
The majestic parent star of the destroyed system had left behind a gift to make amends for the great loss of life. A much smaller star-like object had risen from its ashes. But unlike the star that’s destruction had given birth to it, this newly formed shining sphere of light was somehow given the gift of self-awareness, as well as the ability to travel at will.
It began its sentient existence by feeling a single emotion, common in all modern humans. Upon becoming aware of her surroundings, Aia felt a great sadness wash over her, as if the abyss that surrounded her, had decided to smother her with the memories of the countless beings that had fallen as a result of her birth.
She had traumatic visions of great cities, forests, waterfalls and a variety of creatures; some sentient and some not. Upon searching for meaning in her feelings and the visions that were provoking them, she realized that the great star that had come before her was also self-aware to a certain extent, and she felt an even stronger connection to the past upon making that realization.
She was learning that the region of space she was occupying had been the setting for great miracles. There had been more life present there, in an area that had stretched merely a few hundred million miles across, than had existed on all other living planets combined in the known ancient universe.
Several of her years passed by, before she was finally able to leave the dead system behind her. It took her that long to forgive herself for being the cause of the death of countless billions of life-forms.
She had also developed a great fear of the unknown, as she forced herself to remain trapped within the sea of devastated worlds. In the end, it was an overpowering feeling of loneliness that compelled her to venture out and away from her home region. Aia then found herself on a quest to find a form of life she could at least attempt to communicate with.
As her journey continued, she began to discover her remarkable abilities. Aia was and still is a living form of energy, like nothing else ever recorded. She found that by merely concentrating on acceleration, she could alter her form and composition, transforming herself into a simple beam of light. This enabled her to travel at the speed of light, but also opened her mind to the possibility of traveling even faster.
While in light-form, she discovered invisible microscopic parasites that had seeded themselves everywhere she traveled. These mindless creatures appeared to have been spawned by converging clusters of dark matter, and could only survive by being in a constant state of faster than light motion. They achieved these great speeds by bathing themselves in the brightest sources of light they could find. The energy in light itself was the catalyst for the parasites’ ability to travel faster than it.
Aia found that she was able to acquire their form and composition with ease, and upon the absorption of the light of the stars in her path, she propelled herself across the twelve galaxies in a matter of weeks.
Finally, after spotting a sparkling blue gemstone in the heart of the black ocean, she was learning to call home, Aia came to a stop; assuming her original spherical form. She gazed up at a particular planet resting a few million miles above her, as though it were calling to her. She had passed by countless living worlds on her quest, but had never seen something that could project such beauty from so far away.
The blue orb overhead was special to her, and she could already sense the presence of a reasonably intelligent indigenous species there. She cautiously thrust herself upwards towards the glimmering blue light.
As she crept closer to the planet, she found two massive, rocky, oval- shaped continents that were adjoined by a small sliver of land in between them. The rest of world was completely covered in liquid water. The gargantuan ocean reflected the light of its nearby parent star, which was responsible for the world’s enchanting blue glow.
Enraptured by its beauty and longing for companionship, Aia slowly entered the planet’s atmosphere, causing it to instantly ignite. She quickly retracted herself, but the damage had already been done and was irreversible.
As remarkably intelligent as she was, she was still in a critical developmental stage, and had yet to master the proper way to land on a planet. The destructive power she had inflicted upon the innocent world below was completely out of her control.
Aia watched in horror as the atmosphere burned away, leaving the flaming continents and quickly evaporating ocean at the mercy of the vacuum of space. In what felt like an instant, Aia had been responsible for the destruction of a planet she had desired to call home, and the complete annihilation of all the life that dwelled upon it.
In the very short time she had been alive, she had inadvertently become both a quick and efficient instrument of death. And although she had been born into great sadness and loneliness, her great mistake was forcing her to confront every emotion imaginable at once.
Aia’s frustration over her inability to control her great power, eventually drove her to loathe herself. She spent the next several years attempting to make peaceful contact with the universe’s various sentient inhabitants, only to find that no matter what form of energy she chose to take on, her mere presence always resulted in the near destruction of an entire planet.
After the first world she visited was destroyed, three more would follow before she eventually learned to sense impending chaos and cease her actions before inflicting any more suffering.
In a long diminished galaxy at the edge of the ancient universe, there were three living planets residing in a single solar system that were each home to a spacefaring race. The three peoples were very similar in appearance, as they had a common ancestry, and had joined forces to form a ruthless empire of conquerors called, the Gorgull.
They were a fierce and relentless army of ape-looking creatures, with thick stone-like skin that made it look as though their bodies had been carved from giant boulders.
Their eyes glowed red with their malicious thirst for blood. Their mouths contained two rows of sharp wolf-like teeth, and when opened, revealed a set of two mandibles on either side, extending nearly twelve inches from their faces.
Word of Aia’s presence in the area had reached Teir, the ruler of the Gorgull. The idea of a being of light rocketing through the galaxy and destroying planets at will, appealed greatly to his predatory nature. Being the most sadistic of the alpha males in his company, Teir led a fleet of warships on a course to intercept Aia, after monitoring her current trajectory.
Shortly after their launch, Aia came to a stop at the edge of Gorgull territory, after sensing Tier, as he approached her. At that moment, Aia’s mind was forced into a stream of thoughts and feelings she could not explain. Tier’s pride, anger, hatred and utter need for conquest consumed her. It was the first time she had been close enough to another intelligent being to absorb its consciousness.
As Teir’s influence continued to surge through her, Aia
transformed back into the form of the invisible dark matter parasites, allowing her to travel faster than light and arrive instantly before the Gorgull armada, in her original star form.
She then found herself face to face with Teir, as she came to a stop directly in front of the Gorgull Flagship; a gargantuan spear-shaped piece of rusting metal, with a thick glass window at the top of a tall steel pillar on the ship’s topside. Aia glowed brightly as she peered through the window to find Tier’s haunting gaze watching her from the other side.
Suddenly, Aia found that being in Teir’s presence was enhancing her reception of his essence, to the point of it being able to ravage her energy based composition. It was yet another sensation she was completely unfamiliar with, and by the time it finished running its course, Tier found himself staring into a mirror.
From within his dark, noisy, crowded, smoky bridge compartment, Tier saw that the glowing white orb outside had been replaced by an identical copy of himself.
It was the first time Aia had ever transformed into a carbon based life-form. At the time, she couldn’t comprehend what she had just done or appreciate the implications of it. She only knew that her transformation had provoked a powerful sense of fear, coming from inside the several warships that had come to surround her.
From what she had gathered about the Gorgull, it must’ve been their first experience with true terror in some time.
Aia then looked on from behind her fabrication of Teir’s frightening gaze, as the authentic Tier screamed with rage and ordered his fleet to fire on Aia’s position. The ships fired rapid bursts of dark yellow energy, causing Aia to revert back to her original star form, once the blasts made contact with her.
She then found that with each impact, her natural energy form grew stronger and larger. She could feel a liquid embrace originating from the center of her being. The sensation was intoxicating and was causing her to develop physical mass for the first time.
The liquid then instantaneously converted into a spiraling stream of hydrogen atoms, which gained incredible speed and continued to grow until they had coursed their way through every last inch of her being. The hydrogen atoms then began to converge, causing radiating bursts of helium based energy.
The Gorgull attack had transformed Aia into a main sequence star, very similar to her parent star. But unlike all other known stars in the universe, Aia’s consciousness was still the dominating factor within the star’s structure and had grown even more influential over the elements in her surroundings.
During the first few years of her life, she had learned the most important lesson she would ever learn about herself. Her deeply rooted need to seek out life had become a great sense of responsibility for it. Aia’s chief principle was the belief in the unmatched sacredness of life, and her responsibility to protect it with the incredible powers she had been endowed with.
The Gorgull were a race of blood thirsty savages that raced through the cosmos like an infectious disease, destroying everything and everyone in their path. Aia despised the very idea of their existence, but could not eradicate them without violating her own sacred principles.
Instead, she used her gravitational influence to keep Tier’s fleet close by, until she could find a way to safely do what she knew needed to be done. Tier was trapped in orbit around Aia for months, before she had finally found a way to use her power to safely manipulate the physical universe around her, and cause no further fatalities.
Aia then seemed to explode in a burst of blinding light, which blanketed the Gorgull fleet. Moments later, Aia, along with all of Tier’s warships were transformed into beams of light, causing them to instantly arrive back in orbit around their three home-worlds.
It had become clear to Aia that the Gorgull could no longer be allowed to be a spacefaring people. Knowing that the presence of a second massive star would bring about cataclysmic events in Tier’s solar system, Aia chose to take on the form of a much larger version of one of Tier’s spear-shaped ships. She found that she was able to duplicate Tier’s ship exactly, down to the smallest and most intricate mechanisms. She then used her energy turrets to force the fleet to land on their respective planets.
Once satisfied that the Gorgull had been scared into hiding, Aia cast a wave of energy over their three worlds.
Using her knowledge of the dark matter parasites, she willed the energy ribbon to act in the same fashion, but to feed on the electric currents that Teir’s people used to power their ships, weapons and cities. The Gorgull were then stranded on their home-worlds for the remainder of their existence. The people were never able to harness electricity again. Nor were they ever able to develop a suitable substitute.
After finding peace in the knowledge that she had spared their lives, while saving the lives of countless other races that would’ve fallen at Tier’s hands, Aia left Gorgull territory and continued onward towards what she hoped would be brighter horizons.
Another decade of exploration would follow, before Aia found something of a home in a galaxy she called, “Eizenfar”. After years of studying the billions of different languages spoken throughout creation, she developed her own language in her mind, which helped her immensely with the arrangement of her thoughts.
In the modern human tongue, Aia’s word, “Eizenfar” translates to “quiet soul”. She chose to give her new home galaxy this name, because amongst the twelve galaxies, the one she had chosen was the most sparsely populated.
It was home to only three living worlds out of the hundreds of billions of stars and planets existing therein; a curious choice for a being who had chosen to dedicate their life to seeking out and protecting life.
But at that point in her evolution, Aia had mastered her ability to morph into any form she sampled, as well as her ability to manipulate energy; including her own. The mistakes of her early days were never again repeated. She had spent the last ten years coming and going from dozens of inhabited worlds without leaving behind a single casualty. But of all her wondrous talents, there was one possibility that peeked her interest above all others.
Aia had made a home in Eizenfar in order to use it as an experimental setting. Her great experiment was to be the manifesting of living planets and both sentient and non-sentient indigenous life for those planets.
She was already looked upon as a god or goddess, depending on the physical forms she took when visiting naturally formed worlds and peoples. But after listening to the words of dozens of young speaking life-forms, as they proceeded to worship her every move and thought, she began to question the merit of their beliefs.
Races across the universe perceived her to be an omnipotent deity from a mythical land, sent to cleanse their worlds and minds of all things immoral or impure. The majority of them also believed her to be their sole creator upon her arrival. The fact that their underdeveloped minds immediately jumped to that conclusion, made Aia wonder about the possibility of one day being able to create such life herself. Throughout her journey through space, she had witnessed the natural effects of energy on physical matter in every corner of creation. Aia also believed that the universe must’ve been spawned from a single point of origin; perhaps by a powerful and unique energy source similar to her own composition. But in all her searching, she never found any evidence of a probable birthplace for the twelve galaxies.
Determined to harness and manipulate the molecules necessary to begin her work in Eizenfar, she made it her sole mission, to take an almost lifeless galaxy and transform it into a place so abundant with life, that it would completely overshadow the amount of life she had destroyed in her home region.
Using her ability to break down into the form of the fast moving dark matter parasites, she used that unique perspective on space to become well acquainted with wayward quarks.
Upon examining the quarks individually, she was amazed at how much energy each one contained. She used the momentum of her microscopic parasitic form to coral them and draw them into a large void in the ga
laxy.
It was then that the natural order began to take place before her. She resumed her true form as a powerful main sequence star, in order to keep the trillions upon trillions of quarks from straying away. She marveled at the way they seemed to automatically understand their purpose, as if they possessed a self-awareness similar to hers.
They converged and bonded to form atoms. The atoms then combined to form molecules and by that time, Aia was already using her own projected energy, to make copies of the naturally formed molecules, organelles and maturing cells.
The naturally evolved building blocks of Aia’s first planet were being combined with perfect replications, in order to complete the process faster, without having to gather more resources from elsewhere.
After months of molecular manipulation, as well as the manipulation of both solid and liquid matter, two living worlds had been formed and were in stable elliptical orbits around Aia. They were placed at a distance suitable for life, and were modeled after the first planet Aia had destroyed on her own, shortly after her birth.
The two worlds were given two identical and massive rocky continents above sea level, while the rest of their surfaces were covered in a seemingly endless ocean of beautiful blue water.
The two great oceans in space sparkled beneath Aia’s light. Aia had developed quite a fondness for water and made sure that she would have plenty to perceive, while she worked to deposit plant, animal and sentient life on her new planets.
Before long, the super continents shimmered a dark green color beneath her rays, as they had become the foundations for tropical rainforests that stretched across every inch of rock above sea level.
The great forests evolved into suitable dwellings for creatures that could slither, crawl, walk and fly. While the gargantuan oceans became the home of mammoth sea serpents, creatures with slimy black and dark blue tentacles, resembling octopi, and enchantingly beautiful and colorful finned fish-like creatures.
The smaller organisms resembling tropical fish, were merely a food source for the larger more grotesque ocean dwellers, once all was said and done. But Aia had gone out of her way to establish an efficient ecosystem on both worlds. Only the strong survived, but the meek they hunted were endowed with greater fertility to ensure the long term survival of every species.
As the guardian of two treasure troves of life, one task remained before she could consider her great experiment to be complete. Aia had been born with a natural ability to immediately comprehend and evaluate her surroundings. Her parent star had somehow transferred a wealth of knowledge onto her at the very moment of her conception. This made her determined to endow her first sentient creation with the same intelligence.
Then, as if by the wave of a magic wand, a sudden burst of Aia’s creativity caused the birth of a mysterious race of radically skillful intellectuals. They inhabited both worlds in equal numbers within a matter of hours. And although they were land dwellers, they developed a fascination with the monsters of the sea so powerful, that it inspired their organic spacefaring technology, thousands of years later.
Their true name and physical form continue to remain a mystery, but upon taking to the stars with living ships resembling the giant sea serpents and squids of their home-worlds, they were finally introduced to Aia.
Thousands of years of perfecting her control over energy, gave Aia the ability to essentially split in two, leaving behind a main sequence star for the planets she had created. Her consciousness traveled in a newborn star-like entity that she used as a vessel, with which to introduce herself to her sentient children.
After finally appearing to them, she used a telepathic language that her people had created themselves, and taught them about their true origins.
Although they had developed sizable egos, due to their rapid development and great accomplishments, they were instantly humbled by the knowledge that the parent star they had been staring at and had taken for granted throughout their history, was a conscious being that had been watching their every move all along.
Learning that the same entity they saw in their skies every day was also responsible for their creation, was even more of a disturbing reality for them.
By the time the truth settled in, they were left only with questions about their purpose. Knowing she had diminished their pride, Aia bestowed upon them the destiny she had always intended for them. She told them that they were born into a lifeless void for an important reason.
As she had been blessed with the ability to create life, so had her children. Aia explained to her children, that they were intended to continue her work throughout Eizenfar, by using their extensive knowledge and remarkable organic technology to populate the galaxy with all forms of life.
But Aia also believed in the importance of free will. She decided to give her people a choice and to leave the decision up to a majority vote. They were told they could either fulfill their intended purpose, or choose their own path.
It was the combination of a growing fear of Aia and a burning curiosity about the unknown, which drove the vast majority to vote to introduce an abundance of living planets and other organisms into Eizenfar. It was a decision that would later make them known throughout creation as the “Architects”.
As their journey progressed, the Architects recovered their pride, along with their egos, and became infatuated with the challenge of cultivating planets and designing organisms fit to live on them.
One day, Aia followed them, in the form of a single beam of light to a lonely star, unfit to support organic life. Without a natural ability to manipulate molecules, the Architects were taught to use both their organic and mechanical technology to conduct their own experiments on the seemingly useless star.
It was the first time Aia had chosen to deny their children guidance. Having learned about Aia’s own composition while in her main sequence star form, the Architects altered the composition of the star before them, converting it into a nearly perfect replica of their mother.
Two living planets were soon created and left to orbit the star, complete with large bodies of water, a large quantity of vegetation and non-sentient animal life.
Aia had also chosen not to interfere with the design of the single sentient organism intended for the new worlds.
By that time, the Architects had already formulated a plan to deposit both a formidable and intelligent race of mammals onto both planets, in the same fashion Aia had split the Architect species between two worlds, thousands of years before.
Shortly after the creation of the planets, their grassy meadows were littered with thousands of slimy white oval-shaped cocoons. The oozing, pulsating incubators had fallen from the skies, after being launched from the pores of the giant black tentacles, of the Architect’s infamous Planet Farmers. These were the giant octopi-like ships, used by the Architects to genetically engineer life.
After crash landing onto the surface of their new home with a series of loud thuds, the cocoons began to automatically break apart, unbinding the confused pale adult mammals inside.
It was on that morning twenty billion years ago, that mankind saw their first sunrise. Pale adult men and women, still covered in the slimy white discharge from their synthetic wombs, stood naked, shivering in cold pastures and atop snow- capped mountains.
They gazed up at the sun, not knowing its purpose, but longing for its warmth and embrace. They quivered with fear like children yearning for their mother’s touch.
Aia marveled at the humans, finally feeling that her destiny had been fulfilled. From her invisible place in the cosmos, she watched as the Architects left their creations behind to develop on their own, as she had requested.
They left the region together, but not before Aia took one last look at mankind from the perspective of a wayward beam of light. From high above the new planets, later known by their sentient inhabitants as Siren and Tyrran, she looked into the eyes of man and saw hope.
This is an accurate account of
the creation of ancient man in the time of the ancient verse, as it has been explained to me by my source. My story is nearly complete. It has been one million years since Drellic returned to Siren (Earth) in the early 21st century and nearly destroyed our race.
Now, here I sit, a simple traveler and journalist; listening to the most amazing tale I have ever heard. Nearly all has been revealed. All that remains is the authentic biography of Drellic, which I am told I am now allowed to hear.
This is it. I have told the story up until now as instructed.
Now, I wait to taste my “final meal” before being silenced on this subject. I set out on a journey across uncharted space to conduct this interview and bring this story to light.
Now, as I sit back in my booth, in this strange interstellar diner, staring intently across the table at my overwhelming companion, I can only hope for one thing; that you are as excited about reading these next few hundred pages of text, as I am about writing them.
“The Narrator”
The Spiral Times
Part One: The Kails
The Drellic Saga: Books One, Two and Three Page 53