Life. It has always fascinated me.

From the dawn of the dinosaurs to the dawn of mankind, the origins of life has remained a mystery. In my youth I always thought about life. How we are born, how beings are created.

A close friend of mine told me that, life is a gift from God, we shall never truly understand for it is not our place to, we should just be thankful.

That answer never sat well with me though, that life is a gift from God, and how we shall only ever be thankful for it and not try to understand it, I guess those thoughts are what led me to where I am today, on the floor of my lab bleeding to death.

My fascinations as a child led me to crave the power of creation. To create life anew with my own to hands, something made from my mind, not from an entity that could potentially exist or not. Following my dream, I excelled in my studies, and soon after graduating from Uni, I was accepted into an organisation of a 'questionable moral standing'.

However, it was at this organisation that I set out to fulfil my dreams.

There I distorted life, in an attempt to create it anew. I created chimaera's and homunculi. Abominations of existence made from the deformation of genetic matter in an attempt to create new life, often dying within a week of being made. It was grim work, I neither enjoyed nor hated it, I was merely entranced in the creation of new life, the organisation however was much more interested in the creation of super soldiers, which leads to current predicament.

Soldiers dressed all in black attacked our compound. I'm guessing that our experiments here were not kept as secretive as I had been led to believe, and perhaps a rival group, or perhaps the government themselves decided to put an end to us. To end our work, or to take it as their own I do not know. But I guess now, with two bullets in my chest I'll never know...

As I lie here on the cold ground, i feel myself grow cold, my vision darkening, and with my final breaths, I mutter to myself.

"If, if only I could have done it... If only I could have truly created new life..."

Finally, i feel myself breathe my last breathe, and my mind has truly been let free from my body. But before I lose myself to oblivion, I find an invisible hand gripping my existence, holding me in place, binding my mind to life.

A subtle golden light appeared in front of my eyes, chasing away the shadows as is burst into existence. Time seemed to stop as the light took form,  a teenage girl, of no more than 16 or 17 appeared before me. Nude in appearance, except for the sky blue light enshrouding her body, preventing my from seeing anything 'important'.

Seeming to sense my thoughts, she smirked before speaking in a voice that had no sound, yet I could feel within my being.

"What If, you could create life with your own two hands"

"..."

"If I gave you a new life, to create then create life anew, will you become mine?"

"To create life... I would even sacrifice my own soul, if such a thing exits."

As I croaked out those words, her sapphire eyes seemed to radiate with even more light, engulfing my existence, and I found my consciousness fading to black.

"Then you shall become mine, for now and forevermore, to create my world anew."

The girl looked down at the hollow shell of was once a man, a small smile dancing on her face as she reached down to the man, tracing her hand along the side of his face, with her fingers just phasing through his cheek.

She pulled her hand back, and after staring at him one last time, she vanished, and with her disappearance time continued to flow.

I awoke in what appears to be the abyss of space. Stars shining like diamonds all around, distant nebula’s painting the abyss with all the colours of the spectrum, asteroid belts like distant mine fields in the expanse of space.

Here and now in this great void, I did not think of how I am existing here, my mind did not wander through the impossibility of my current situation. It was as if my reason and emotion had been frozen in the face of all that was before me, there as only, Awe.

As I look down to see the stars bellow me, I find that I had no feet, legs, appendages, nor a body of any kind. And then I remember. Ah right… I died didn’t I? Strange though... To think that after death there was neither heaven nor hell for me. Or perhaps this is a form of stellar purgatory? Regardless, all that matters now is that I am here now.

Being bodiless I can’t move, no matter how hard I try, all I can accomplish is to swivel my perspective in space, allowing me to see the stars around me. Hmmm… Not being able to move is going to be boring assuming that I’m stuck here forever… Thankfully, something catches my eye.

Far off, in a distant expanse of space, I see a green light, no a cloud coalescing. As I focus on it, I find my consciousness transported before it. It was beautiful. A nebula of greens, reds and blues, a rainbow of gases swirling around each other, coalescing into numerous solids.

As I watched it, I felt as if time was passing me by, have I been floating here for hours or years I don’t know, but before me, a planet is forming. The nebula of gases had coalesced into a crimson ball of light, spinning around a nearby star. As it cooled, the burning crimson flames turned a dark orange, like dying embers, and soon it turns completely black. After what seems like another hour, clouds have begun to form, and in mere moments oceans form on its surface.

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This. This planet before me. It’s beautiful. Although there are no plants that I can see covering its surface, its vast oceans shine like a great sapphire in the void of space.

"Do you like it?"

A voice comes from behind me, interrupting my train of thought. Turning around I see her, the girl from when I died, standing, no floating before me.

This second time I see her, she no longer glows with golden light, and I can make out her features in greater detail. Unfortunately, she is now fully clothed…

She is fairly short, average for a girl though. Her shoulder length black hair is kept out of her face with a couple of hair clips, and she wears a long grey hoodie that goes down to her thighs, stylised with a blue frog pattern on the hood. Overall she looks like a Japanese college student…

What is this? I think to myself.

"This, this is my birth"

How did you?

"Your mind, I can read it like a book"

Who are you then?

"I am a newly born celestial body, in your world your equivalent would be Gaia or God"

You call yourself a God! Don’t joke with me!

"We are both in space, I’m not dying, your dead and you have witnessed the birth of a planet. If that isn’t enough evidence for my godhood I don’t know what is."

She leans back floating in space as if resting against a wall, wearing an annoyed expression on her face. Never would have thought that a God would have an annoyed expression. Never thought that there was such thing as a God, assuming that this is real, and I’m hallucinating as I lie dying back at the lab…

"You know I can still hear you right? And I don’t like to be reduced to the level of a mere hallucination."

Ah, right… Sorry. Regardless, why am I here then?

"Finally asking the right questions"

*mental sigh*

"Fine, fine I’ll tell you"

"You see, I am a newly born celestial body, in other words I am the God of that newly created planet, we are one and the same."

She shifts her position, falling backwards and stopping as if landing on a bed.

"As a divinity of a celestial body, it is my job to ensure that my planet is inhabited, and that is where you come in!"

She takes a stance, pointing towards me with her outstretched arm as if she is posing for a photo at a convention.

*sigh* Are you really a God?

"I’ll take a pass on that comment and get back to the matter at hand."

Go on.

"Ya see, most gods like me, when they are born, let nature take its course or actively create new life and leave it for a few millennia to get evolution going, but that’s really long and boring... So what I’m going to do is assign that role to you!"

She gestures again to me, once more taking an embarrassing pose.

So wait… You are saying that you want me to create new life? My emotions start going into overdrive, my heart, if I still had it would be beating out of my chest. My dream, will I finally be able to achieve it here and now, after my death?

"I’m going to make you a major divinity on my planet, governing over creating life and evolution. To make it easier for you to create life, I’m providing you with a couple of gifts that will help you create new life. The first, is the Ark. It’s like a memory bank, containing the genetic material of every sing species that currently lives, or has ever lived back on your old world, the second you’ll see pretty soon."

Why did you choose me? Out of all of the people back on Earth, why me?

"Because you said you would give anything to be able to create new life, anyway, I think it’ll be interesting if you’re the one who created life on my planet."

"Oh, and also this world is in a different dimension to your old, there is something known as mana in this dimension, so have fun with that when making new organisms."

Mana, as in like magi-

"One last thing!"

She says interrupting me.

"Me making you into a major divinity, as well as the gifts I’m giving you is going to drain me for a while, so I’m gonna sleep for a few millennia, see ya!"

She blows a kiss towards me, and I feel as if a great wind is blowing me away, causing my consciousness to once more fade to black.