For thousands of years, she crossed the cosmos. Ensconced in a shell that hid her divine power, she was no different from any rogue asteroid. She crossed the boundary of the pocket Realm hiding Yznarian and into the Milky Way galaxy. Far from Earth, she went, dreaming as she slept. Gone were her memories of her previous two existences. One as a mortal, another as a Goddess. And yet faint traces of those lives, feelings, and impressions so deeply ingrained into her very being they hadn't disappeared even after being wiped clean by her former adversary.
But the burdens she once shouldered, the grief she once felt were gone. She was at peace and the warm mercy of her once bitter enemy shed any karma the goddess could ever bear behind. Hers was a clean slate, in more ways than others.
The interstellar medium was dry and devoid of most energies. Mana, the metaphysical power required for magic to come into being was non-existent but in small pockets around the galaxy. Whenever she crossed one of those, her conscience waxed and shone. Her dreams became more lucid. Those places were often around a star or a planet with a magic Core. In the latter, life always bloomed and magic made the impossible possible. She would dream of these worlds and feel a deep sense of loss, a longing to have a home.
The Goddess was alone, curled inside her shell. She wished to have one such world for herself. She wished to bring life and happiness to the people living in her world, to be worshiped, and to help them in return. To be a real Goddess, to atone for some past sin she no longer remembered.
She drifted through the galaxy. Jumped from arm to arm. For a hundred thousand years. Her homeworlds were no more. Not the native or the adoptive one. The planets might still exist but the worlds she knew had changed fundamentally.
One day, eighteen hundred light-years away from the Sol system, she came closer to yet another star system with a stronger-than-nothing magical aura. A triple system, with a single water planet orbiting one of the main stars and a small dwarf star at the edges of the system, flying alone in an orbit that took 825 Earth years to complete.
The Goddess drifted too close to the System. Her enormous form was caught by the gravity of the stars and she entered a decaying orbit. She spun and spun around the central twin stars, moving ever closer with each rotation. Drinking from the Mana cloud wrapped around the System, she became ever more conscious. Ever more awake.
She opened her reptilian-slitted eyes and stared at the bright center of the star system. She saw the two stars, one deep yellow, the other almost white. She saw the single blue planet, a mini-Neptune with a few dozen moons of varying sizes and a beautiful planetary ring. Then her eyes focused on the barycenter of the system, where a ring of metal of enormous proportions floated between the two stars.
In her dream-like state, she watched for a long time, hundreds of years, soaking in the magic, awakening her being. But she wasn't meant to be left alone.
She sensed their minds. Felt their life forces as their spaceships approached cautiously. Curious, she swiveled her head inside her cocoon and stared at the newcomers. A small fleet of starships. She cast her senses inside and was surprised at what she found.
Men and women, shapes so familiar she could swear she was once one of them. The thought awakened one of those hard-to-scrub impressions that remained after her defeat thousands of years ago. Her mind stirred and the metaphorical cobwebs were cast away. She became conscious, awake.
The people inside the starships noticed it too. She felt energy swirl inside the ship's engines as they drew massive amounts of power into their... weapons?
She shuddered and shook her long neck, her front legs, wings, hind legs, and tail. Some of her scales flaked off, already unattached to her body but kept in place by inertia and her own personal gravity.
The Goddess stretched and her shell broke.
The starfaring people panicked at the sight of her majestic form. They knew very well what she was, a being so ingrained in the human imagination it might be real. It was real.
Not knowing what they were facing, the starships opened fire on the massive space dragon. Beams of energy and projectiles moving at relativistic speeds flew her way. With enough precision to hit a bull's eye thousands of kilometers away and against what could be considered a stationary target, all of the shots hit.
The damage was minimal and yet the Goddess roared silently in pain. She retaliated, commanding the cloud of Mana around the System to do her bidding. An impossibility, fire came into being in the sheer vacuum of space and shot out of her mouth toward the ships. The gout of fire expanded into a cloud and moved forward, slower than the beams and blasts of electromagnetic-contained plasma but yet fast enough the ships had little room to escape the divine dragonfire.
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Hundreds perished in these opening moves. The surviving ships, none unscathed, attempted to flee. They propelled themselves backward as they used side thrusters to turn the vessels and use the rear engines for maximum acceleration.
Driven forward by her prey drive, the Goddess gave chase. Around the planet-sized metal ring, other ships mobilized. As she flew in hot pursuit, the Goddess Divine Core was hard at work, pouring copious amounts of Mana collected and generated naturally through eons into the star system, thickening the cloud. It spread faster than light, seeping into the three stars and planet. Changing those celestial bodies forever.
Months later, she approached the orbit of the twin stars. The human starships gathered to defend their precious stargate. The dragon Goddess, now fully awake, stopped outside their firing range. For quite some time, days instead of hours, the Goddess and humans stared at one another. Through the stargate, more ships arrived, answering the distress call sent by their compatriots.
The crew of one of the ships panicked at the sight of the massive space creature and opened fire. In pain, the Goddess roared in defiance and this time, the people heard, with their hearts and souls instead of their ears. The whole fleet went into disarray, a few ships fleeing toward the stargate and perceived safety, others self-detonating, but most of them also shooting what they had at the moon-sized dragon.
Retaliation was swift. The Goddess flared her wings and caught the light of the sun. Changing the properties of her scales, she reflected the concentrated sunlight and most of the energy weapons back at the fleet. Thousands of starships were destroyed several seconds later. At these vast distances, even light worked with a delay.
Then she dove toward the tiny metallic spacecraft. An opponent this size could even compromise the ancient Stargate. The commanders of the fleet tried to coordinate the fight but with their minds and hearts in a rout, it was impossible.
Magic flared around the celestial sphere of the star system. It awakened and rekindled something in the biggest star, forever changing its color from white-yellow to blue. A detonation of metaphysical energies drenched the whole System in Mana. An ancient shield burst around the stargate, triggered by automated defenses placed by a civilization older than Terra. It saved the starships closer to the Stargate while the others were doomed.
Magic, a fifth fundamental force, had a profound effect at a subatomic level. It stabilized heavy radioactive isotopes, making them stable. The atomic furnaces in the starships outside the stargate's shield immediately stopped working as the temperatures of their reactors dropped vertiginously. It also bridged the semiconductor gaps at a microscopic level. With the quantum miniaturization of computing circuits of the space age, that meant every computer not made to survive in a mana-rich environment, huge and cumbersome, also stopped working.
The unfortunate starship crews had only one choice. They ejected their escape pods and descended toward the planet. A water-mining colony, it was terraformed and moved away from the star. The colony had about fifty million people living on the surface of the mini-Neptune's floating continents.
Victorious, the Goddess didn't leave the combat unscathed. Though infused with sublime energies, her body was wounded. She felt her recently regained consciousness fade. She too quickly decided to descend upon the water planet. Her scales burned in re-entry but she was a dragon. A creature borne of fire, she feared not the heat. The Goddess splashed on the vast oceans of the planet and sunk to its core. There, she curled and slept, biding her time and resting.
Her Divine Core, however, kept churning and spitting out raw Mana. The world awakened and was bound to the Goddess' fate.
The Colonists would soon discover their lives were forevermore changed. Ancient DNA sequences, kept silent by epigenetic locks awakened as Mana removed such locks. They underwent an Awakening as their true nature was revealed in the light of Magic. Their offspring would be born as Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Ogres, Gnomes, and many other fantastic species.
They were trapped on the planet's surface. With magic active, their artificial gravity plates stopped working. Their nuclear reactors shut down as both fission and fusion reactions refused to happen. Their computers short-circuited but for the most primitive ones, only kept as novelties. Entire digital libraries with petabytes of text vanished. They were left only with the knowledge they had in either their heads or in non-digital media such as paper books, also only kept as novelties.
Without nuclear reactors, the only hope to escape the planet's gravity pull was with chemical rockets. But the gravity, three times what humanity used to have in the cozy cradle called Earth, the gravity insisted on keeping them on the ground. Their weight tripled, and the survivors barely had the strength to move.
But what magic takes, magic also gives. Infused with Mana, their bodies started using innate body enhancement magic. The energy that doomed them to stay on the planet's surface also granted them the power to survive.
It wasn't easy. Imbued with Mana, creatures, and ideas also changed. Monsters were birthed by ordinary animals and also spawned out of thin air whenever enough Mana concentrated in one spot.
Years later, the Goddess awoke. She saw the plight of the people, dispossessed of their prized magic, disavowed by their knowledge and science, surviving a magical apocalypse. She took pity on the people and decided to help them. She focused inward and focused on her Core. She wrote rows upon rows of glyphs, drawing from another ancient memory that wasn't properly scrubbed off of her mind, activating a System to help the people grow stronger. They would worship her through the System, share their faith with her, nourish the Goddess, and in turn, she would grant them the power to achieve greatness.
Then she went to sleep. Decades later, she woke up again and talked with her mind with chosen individuals of great faith. They would be her word's bearers upon the world, her Church. A bargain was struck. She would grant them a smidgen of her Divinity in exchange for their service.
Earth was lost to an Apocalypse. Humanity was fated to be vagrants among the stars. They inhabited many planets but always as guests. Always
But an act of mercy a hundred thousand years later gave some of them a fantastical home. 1,870 light-years away, in the Cygnus constellation. A star system once known as KOI-5.