CHEL'a

Is it so hard to believe that there are worlds beyond our own planets? Inhabited worlds, lost worlds, worlds of water with different life. worlds just born and worlds at their end. How many have precipitated their own demise through hubris or belief in infallibility of Gods or Goddesses.

We are experiments of Gods. Playthings. Ants on which a God pours out a cup of water to watch the ants scurry in furious confusion. Or ant farms left to their own devices to see how life left alone would prevail...or not.

This is a small moment of such an ant. A life form foreign to ours but every basic desire is here. Am I alone? Am I the last? Is there hope?

............................CHEL'a: Of Gods and Men......................

Chel'a sniffs the air, hoping for spoor, stale or slight...nothing. Looking down, smudges visible to those who could read the land..how long? Since the feet had left their marks?

Male or female?

The burning orange sands melted the memory to itself before hot eddies whirled what loose sands were left, away. Barely breathable air a suffocating miasma of misery if not for the lungs and four nostrils on Chel'as face made for his world.

A world that now was rejecting him and his kind forever.

The fires were cooking everything! What ashes were left blown away immediately. Of course, not much left to make ash of from a dying world that caught fire twenty turns gone with only the sturdiest of material holding on til the forge itself became pure fire, taking even the rock into overheated ecstasy!

What Gods were left to pray to, had proven impotent and the Tana' teh lost all faith. Sullen glances at the casual altar replaced the looks of hope once directed at them.

The God-King Tana'teya chosen by the people was as lost as the one that did not answer prayers.

Strangely, there is beauty in death. There is beauty in a dying world-assuming it's not your world dying. How long til this orb of immeasurable beauty succumbed to the onslaught of laws beyond the ken of people?

Granted though, it was the people that set these laws in motion, playing with fire ancients can't understand. Too late, they opened their senses to a changing world speeding faster and faster towards the precipice. Thus began a desperate search for salvation. The Gods had left and only the science stayed to remind of the warnings so flippantly tossed aside, believing the world was eternal.

And the world paid the price. Out of ignorance. Out of pride.Out of hubris.

At the 17th turn they had mounted a ferocious plan to send some of the young with mentors to the 3rd planet out from their God. They toiled for a year on hopes and prayers and the knowledge of the science-elders using the last of usable metal, devising an oscillating shield to hold its form and to protect against the insanity of space. Audacious? Absolutely! Desperate? Undeniably! But is not desperation the father of invention?

It would take one turn to reach the next planet out. An uninviting water-world, cold in comparison to the warmth of Terra. Hostile in its environs and rich in un-breathable air..but we could adapt..or die.

In the end, the disintegration of our world cut off what updates were sent back to the scientists and the angst and desperation of a dying people turned all against each other, so we never knew if they succeeded in their attempt or not. No matter. The people are dead.

Chel'a rises. Hope is a strange bedfellow and is the last to die. His last thought being, "maybe they made it", as he walks following the barely visible..hoping..feels like the world is burning hotter as the clouds rain like hot metal from above.

Meanwhile, the last great hope of an almost dead world is searing through the atmosphere of a hostile watery planet. It's cargo of humanity long dead from multiple systems failures. They knew it was a gamble, but space is even more toxic than a dying planet or a planet full of giant reptiles. The ship burns in one crushing explosion into the belly of an adopted world, spreading its dead DNA.