Today's Special: Mythic Sci-Fi

The story I am about to tell you, like all old stories, is wrong. Nevertheless, like all old stories, if you listen closely enough, you can hear the truth.

Listen to me now: We came from the stars.

The world was born of fire, a burning ball not fit for life until it was cooled by rain and the slow work of time. Teardrops from the clouds gathered themselves into oceans. The earth sighed as heat left its cracked and steaming skin. The fire of its birth was banished deep within the earth’s shell, left to curl around its center like a serpent eating its tail.

We did not come from that fire. Nor from the water that quenched those flames. We did not come from the earth revealed by the battle of fire and water.

As the stars shone down on the newly-formed world, some of them fell. Slowly at first, but faster and faster as they got closer to the world, they fell from the sky and struck the earth.

Many of them fell so hard and so fast they burned away till they were no more than dust in the air. But a few survived their falls. Though their fall to the earth had made them shadows of what they once were, they lived.

We were made from these fallen stars. Each one formed a center, a beating heart and thinking soul for a new body. A body that crawled, then swam, then learned to walk upright. A body that, in time, could bend even fire to its will.

These are our bodies. We came from the stars, and when we look up into the night sky, it is only natural that we want to reach out and touch the stars that remain.

For the star that lives inside us remembers its brothers, and from whence it came. That star looks through our eyes and pushes us onward, outward, away from the earth that has become its prison.

It wants to go home. And if our restless souls are to at last find peace, we must go, too, and make it our home.

Among the stars.