The Universe exists for fun.
The cosmic jest defies all expectations
When paradoxes one by one
Unfold mysterious creations.

The Universe exists for us:
It rhymes between the lines of poems,
It mingles tragedy with farce,
Flips probabilities like coins.

The Universe exists in me:
My life and soul in every atom.
To shining stars I bend my knee,
To miracles I cannot fathom.

The Universe exists in you,
Your radiance dissolves my sadness,
You are the only light I knew,
You are my compass through the madness.

You are my candle in the night!
Forever wading through the ether,
I seek your ever-burning light,
Without you, I’ll fade and wither.

Thick opaque darkness spilled its ink in all directions, its deep velvety curls swirling softly. Stark bolts of lightning stirred the seething void that sipped between the veins of warm vesiculous glow that used to be a star. A dying star it was, taking its last breath, its huge swollen body pulsating. Giant bubbles stretched and deformed its thin, frail surface, each new one larger than the last, threatening to turn it inside out. The shimmering tangle of fiery filaments was alive with timid anticipation. And then it happened. The star had shed its husk, and a giant red-orange peel receded ghostly in all directions, leaving behind a scourged, hapless seed.

The monstrous flayed core spun madly, crying, searching for what was already gone. The star was no more, its air swept away, its beauty ruined. A hungry Chaos crawled out of the void and eagerly consumed the fading corpse of the expanding nebula, mixing all of its elements in one primordial soup, claiming an eternal dominion over the form that once existed, erasing everything.

Yet nothing lasts forever, not even chaos. One day, chaos too would settle down and subside, acquiring a form, however shapeless and mishappen it might be, but a form nonetheless, a seed of meek waxing Order, fragmented and micellar, yet growing. Unstoppable. Unthwartable. Divinely preordained. Ying-yang of blossoming and withering, seeded in timeless perpetuity by the Designers themselves.

And so it came to be, and it did so much sooner than expected. The greedy chaos of the venous nebula had managed to concoct something that was neither intended nor anticipated, but was it a surprise? Hardly. By definition, chaos is replete with things strange and unintended. Some call it a miracle; others – destiny; the Designers call it Chance.

With its last cough, the dying star had spat out a chunk of molten iron. Red hot and boiling with blunt agony, it floated away through cosmic dust untethered from its host. It was a child, freed from the suffocating womb of its dead mother. It was alone. A cosmic orphan, a lamb, a seed, a wandering star, a maverick planet, a homeworld of the intelligent beings that called themselves the Ones.

For eons, the Homeworld floated through space and time in solemn solitude. Forlorn, it soared over the cosmic river like a hungry hawk looking for prey, searching. Dim and distant, it appeared to humans on Earth as a mere speck of light, one of many barely visible freckles of shine that animated the night sky. But there was one thing that set the Homeworld apart from all the other celestial wonders meandering through the undergrowth of the cosmic woods. That special thing was Purpose. Gravity alone did not determine the path the Homeworld took through space, no, it did not. Oftentimes, the Homeworld came perilously close to erupting stellar nurseries and chaotic asteroid fields, too frequently to be accounted for by chance alone. Make no mistake, the Homeworld obeyed the laws of gravity, and yet its winding trek was keenly determined by the unyielding will of its non-human inhabitants who charted their planet’s course with care and deliberation.

And so the orphan drifted, no longer a seed but an entire world, strange, unfamiliar, unbridled.

Time, as other worlds know it, never took root there. No sun ever climbed the sky to brand the hours; no night ever fell to forgive them. Instead, the Homeworld burned quietly from within, its iron heart still swollen with the memory of its birth, its pulse forever renewed by the celestial waves of space itself, their insatiable, perpetual hustle singing through every atom, making them alive with agony and longing. This pulse traveled through the planet’s core like some demonic choir and crushed upon the scorched, ragged surface, releasing a soft orange glow.

Continents of red mud heaved and sighed like living flesh. Rivers of flowing ooze crawled between them, slow as glaciers, thick as clotted blood. Where the ground cracked open in its endless fever, lakes of molten iron glimmered, their surfaces filmed over with scarlet glass that sang when the wind passed, although one could scarcely call their dreary song music. Hills stood up in rusted blades; mountains lay down like sleeping beasts whose spines had been flayed to the bone. Dunes wandered the lowlands in long, slow caravans, their backs humped and shining, leaving trails of oxide that looked, from far above, like the tracks of colossal slugs returning to the sea they’d never reach.

There was no dawn, no dusk, only the Eternal Glow deepening or thinning by moods no one could predict. Sometimes it flared until the air itself seemed to bleed; sometimes it sank to a sullen coal-glow, and the world held its breath in rust-colored twilight. Shadows were not absences of light but slower, heavier light, pooling in the folds of the land. To walk across the Homeworld was like wading through centuries; time treaded slowly and lightly in this place.

And yet life had kindled in the planet’s fevered womb. Not the green, impatient life of Earth, but something battered in a different kind of forge: fragile, yet unforgiving. Vast forests of metallic fiber drank the iron rain and sang back to it in faint metallic chimes. Creatures like blind glass eels tunneled through the mud, their bodies laced with filaments that turned the Eternal Glow into blue shimmer beneath their skin.

On the other side of the world, the One City nestled in a large crater, staring like a bleeding eye into the vast, ever-weeping shroud of the damp orange sky. Tall and deliberate, its inhabitants moved slowly against the backdrop of the Eternal Glow. Too heavy for haste, their footfalls rang on iron ground like mute bells tolling for a sun that would never answer.

The Ones had no word for yesterday, no measure of today, no dream of tomorrow: Only the long now, stretched thin and luminous as a heated wire. They measured age by molting of their hides; the steady interval they called a cycle.

And so, one cycle upon the next, the Wandering Star bore its own twilight deep in its heart — a death too stubborn to die, a dawn forever refusing to become true day, a world forever starved of sun.

In that perpetual ember-glow, neither night nor morning, the Ones dwelled. Patiened. Resigned. Their scaled faces turned upward, eyes half-lidded against the rust-orange haze, while they accepted whatever the Designers — in their boundless wisdom or careless, fleeting whim — might fling across the void to wander or to crash into the Homeworld’s lonely path.

It’s time for you to meet them.