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 and orange peel receded ghostly in all directions, leaving behind a tiny helpless seed.

The hyperdense crystalline 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 happened, 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 may call it a miracle. Others call it a chance.

With its last cough, the dying star had spit 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, free 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.

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 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 turbulent stellar nurseries and treacherous 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 largely determined by the unyielding will of its non-human inhabitants who charted their planet’s course with care and deliberation.

Wandering planets are not themselves rare, but this one was unique among its lot. Most are cold, dead worlds, floating graveyards, frightening and desolate, but this one wasn’t. Far from dead, the Homeworld was warm and hospitable. It wore a thick and hazy clout of air full of perpetual red-orange fog. The bowels of the planet were made of iron, and so were its hills, mountains, and ravines. With time the iron rusted giving the planet its insidious blood-red color. Moisture clumped the iron dust into thick red mud that filled innumerable swamps, and iron sand built iron dunes resembling giant slugs. Orange fog was everywhere, and it exuded a dim, eerie radiance that swirled and shimmered as if it were alive. This queer glow would most certainly have looked disturbing to our human eyes, yet for the ones inhabiting the Homeworld the sight of it was as most ordinary.

The Homeworld was a measured planet. It had no clouds, no weather, no rain, no oceans and rivers. The planet donned neither green pastures nor lush forests, but only perpetual thick fog. With no star to call its host the Homeworld had neither mornings nor evenings, neither days nor nights, neither summers nor winters. Usual measures of time were not practiced there. The Homeworld’s air weekly illuminated its surface, creating the most notable feature of this world, its eternal dusk. Where did this glow come from? Nobody knew for certain, but the Elders said that the Homeworld kept alive by subsiding on the crumbs of space itself. Cutting across the tracks of other stars, the Homeworld feasted on the waves the stars had left behind in their wake. These waves stirred up great heat deep in the Homeworld’s iron bowels and made its skies glow. Ubiquitous soft orange and red light was everywhere.

With little weather and no seasons, the Homeworld was awash with dull comfort, boring as it was. The warm and humid air brought fog and dew but did not strain to father either lakes or creeks. It must have been the iron of the planet that fostered this tranquility. Heat traveled fast through iron, leaving little room for change.

The Homeworld shape was that of a misshapen honeycomb or more precisely, a dodecahedron. The highlands were but rusty outcrops of the iron mountains and the lowlands were covered by charcoal-like pitch-black soil. There was an uncanny music to these rusty highlands as if the entire planet was forged by giants on an immense cosmic anvil. Upon its birth, the planet boiled with a colossal wave of molten iron that rose and bucked in giant lumps, then froze quickly when the Homeworld had left its rocking cradle split open by its dying mother. This giant iron wave rose one last time and froze forever, giving the world its regular appearance.

The planet was large—bigger in girth and more massive than Earth—and partially hollow. Perhaps the iron mountains on the Home World’s surface were not just mountains but gargantuan world-size bubbles formed when the planet’s core was in turmoil, boiling. We do not know for sure, but this is how the Homeworld came to be, and this is how it looked from the early days of its creation. Fixed in time, the Homeworld was unchanging; life on it was slow.

Life on the Homeworld did not appear quickly. Only the Designers know why, but it took eons before the Homeworld ventured close enough to one of the living planets to pick up some pollen, spores, and germs to give its barren landscape a seed. Its virgin lands were fertile. Once impregnated, the life took quickly to its char-black lowlands, growing red moss, cereals, and low, crawling shrubs. Be as it may, it was a frugal variety, but it was a miracle that life took root here at all. How could there be life without the sun? Yet the inner glow and warmth of the planet itself were enough for life to adapt to this new environment, evolving a stingy yet hardy variety.

The animals did not appear on the Homeworld for many more eons, not until the Homeworld was visited by intelligent beings whose origins were lost in times immemorial. Perhaps it was them who settled the Homeworld and brought their engineered livestock to the planet, which was benign and boring. There were few wild animals on the Homeworld, mostly bats. The few animals that existed were colored brown and all shades of ochre. Utilitarian by design, some animals gave milk, others gave wool, and some were suitable for riding and hauling. None of them existed for their own purpose and account. They were all a part of a plan, a grand design, which seemed to pervade every aspect of life on the Homeworld.

Who were the Designers? We do not know. Who are the intelligent beings that settled the Homeworld? We do not know either. All we know is that they are tall and slender, their skin is grayish-green with a touch of blue, they are bipedal, they have six fingers and six toes, their skin is scaly, and their heads are long and conical. The eyes are narrow slits, and their ears are mere holes. They look like outsiders on this planet, which makes one believe that they were not native to this world and must have evolved in an environment very different from this planet. Perhaps they were even cold-blooded, and it was the perpetual warmth, wetness, and soft twilight of the Home World that made this planet so appealing to them. Living on the Homeworld for them was like living underwater without being under water. A strange and new experience for a reptilian species, the experience they grew to be accustomed to and like.

Life is truly mysterious. It adapts to everything. With time the inhabitants of the Homeworld grew accustomed to their new mother and eventually forgot their true origins.