"In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Earth should have died.

By all logic, by every scientific principle understood by humankind before their departure, the planet should have been reduced to nothing more than a scorched, lifeless rock. The Helios Event had been absolute. It burned the surface clean, stripped the sky of its air, boiled the oceans into vapor.

And yet, against all probability, the planet survived.

Not unchanged, of course. Nothing could endure such an event without consequence. But something—some force, some will beyond understanding—had refused to let the Earth crumble into dust.

The solar flare did more than incinerate the surface. It destabilized Earth’s orbit, knocking it loose from the gravitational pull of its now-dying sun. What should have been an end became a beginning.

Earth drifted.

It moved like a ghost through the void, an orphaned planet untethered from any system. Such a thing was not unheard of; rogue planets had been theorized before, bodies that roamed the universe without a star to call their own.

But this was different.

A series of improbable, impossible cosmic events conspired to keep the planet intact. A gravitational slingshot past a neutron star pulled Earth away from the dying solar system, sending it hurtling into intergalactic space instead of falling into the black abyss of a collapsed sun. A rogue black hole passed close—close enough to stretch time around the drifting planet, but not so close as to devour it. An encounter with a passing nebula wrapped it in a cradle of interstellar gases, coating it in new, raw elements that would one day give birth to an atmosphere.

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The universe, it seemed, had refused to let the Earth die.

Or perhaps something else had refused.

Beneath the dead crust of the planet, something stirred.

It was not awake. Not truly. But neither was it entirely unconscious. A presence—formless yet vast, aware yet dreamlike—lingered in the bones of the Earth. It pulsed in time with the planet’s slow journey, shifting, stretching, rewriting what had been lost.

The ground that had turned to glass softened. The airless sky thickened. Oceans formed in places they had never been before, sculpted by unseen hands. The landscape twisted, mountains rising where there had been none, forests growing from seeds that had never existed.

Earth was not the same planet it had once been.

It had become something else.

And then, after drifting for an unknowable span of time, Earth found itself captured by a new star.

A young, vibrant giant at the heart of a super-galaxy teeming with life.

For centuries—perhaps millennia—the planet remained unnoticed. The civilizations of this new galaxy had long since mastered space travel, their empires spanning solar systems, their explorers mapping every anomaly the cosmos had to offer.

And yet Earth remained hidden, a nameless, rogue world drifting at the edge of the galactic frontier.

Until a deep-space mining fleet detected an energy anomaly.

At first, it was dismissed as interference. A dying world, rich with heavy metals, but nothing more. But then the readings changed. The energy wasn’t static—it pulsed, fluctuated. It was alive.

And that was impossible.

The first scouting ships landed on Earth expecting ruins, remnants of some long-dead civilization. Instead, they found an anomaly beyond comprehension. A world teeming with strange, ever-changing landscapes. A planet that did not conform to any known natural law. A place where physics itself seemed uncertain.

It was not just alive.

It was aware.

Word spread quickly. Scientists, scholars, and warlords alike became obsessed with Earth’s discovery. What was this place? What was this energy that defied logic?

They called it The Echo—a power embedded in the very fabric of the planet, a force that shifted and reformed as though the world itself was dreaming.

It did not take long for Earth to be repurposed.

What better place to test the limits of understanding than a world where understanding itself was fluid? What better training ground for warriors, scholars, and explorers than a planet that reshaped itself with every step?

And so, Earth became a proving ground.

Academies across the galaxy sent their finest students here—to learn, to train, to test themselves against an environment that refused to remain static. The planet was not colonized in the traditional sense; no cities were built, no civilizations formed. Instead, it became a pilgrimage site, a place where those seeking power or knowledge came to challenge the unknown.

And at the heart of it all—buried beneath layers of time, asleep within the world that had unconsciously remade itself—

something remained.

Waiting.

Dreaming.

Until the day it woke up.