Stars fill the night sky, the night sky over all worlds. One world sat in its own personal gravity well that it made all by itself. Surrounded on all sides by the cosmos. A cosmos filled with more stars and more worlds. Together those balls of rocks and gas formed the universe which gave the abyss a sense of itself. The abyss never forgave the universe for this. Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time considering their existence will understand, usually five to fifteen seconds was all that was necessary.

On this particular world that spun on its axis that spun around a star in the corner of an old galaxy. There lived many creatures, well some of them lived. Some of them died. Most of them sat somewhere in the middle of the two. Doing this or that in the background. Gods and celestial beings of all sorts decided one day to put all these creatures in this world. Partly as an experiment, partly as a joke. Mostly because they were bored. When you are a piece of eternity that persists partially for all of forever, you need to find things to do. After a time, consorting and copulating with other beings of divine craft loses its luster.

So some of these gods from time to time get together with other gods and play games. Such as when they toss asteroids to see who can land closest to the center of galaxies. On occasion one of those asteroids may strike a planet with sentient life. That’s worth double in some circles. Others will gather up bulbous amounts of nebulas and see who can hawk them the farthest. They are not so different from you and me when you think about it. But you probably should not tell them that. In order to maintain godhood it seems necessary for most of them to go on believing they are by all accounts superior to mortal lives.

What made this particular world quite special was not really anything at all. Oh, there is magic of course. And elves, and dwarves, and goblins, and cats, and dogs, and women, and men. Also birds, some dragons here or there which were distant cousins to the birds. Not the kind invited to holiday get-togethers, however. A smattering of fishes, squids, octopi, and crustaceans of various sizes from the kind that fits in your palm to the kind that will fit you in their palms. The planet had plants as well. Pretty flowers and adorable mushrooms. Bushy bushes and proud trees.

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Some of these varied organisms and creatures even got together occasionally and said things to each other like. “Hello.”, “How’s the weather?”, and “Hey, what if we all came together and shared the resources of the world? We could till the fields, and work with the other species to construct homes. Give to one another based on our ability in accordance with their needs. Set up a cyclical system in which the governance and use of resources were made manifest and responsible so all could prosper?”

Those ones were usually thrown off cliffs. Much to the confused amusement of some of the gods.

The various species capable of speech and use of tools generally preferred to create societies. The poll is still out on whether that will work out in the long run for them.

So you see nothing really all that special about this world when held up to all the other billions out there orbiting one of the billion other star systems. And that is not even touching on the myriad fractured universes that slide against this one. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. So please do not think much more about that for the time being, or anything else for that matter. Instead, think about this world and its plants, animals, and people. The ones that look like you, and especially the ones that do not. Think about what there is to be learned here. Which is something hopefully. Think about how exciting a new story can be. The novelty of something never experienced. How alive and awake it may make one feel. Because as with all things, they must end. Before they can end, however, they must begin.