Era of Desolation
Era of Desolation
At first it was simply fighting over territory as civilizations colonized habitable planets. But possessing mana rich planets was not enough to sate their thirst. The various cultures, coalitions, and corporations of the Era of Desolation competed to see who could acquire the most of what they viewed as a precious galactic commodity. As with whales and petroleum on Earth, the Human home world, industries sprang up to harvest it, glutting themselves on what seemed an endless supply of ready power.
Ethical concerns grew among the civilized races regarding the harvesting of mana. Some of the more 'soft-hearted' complained that harvesting populated planets for mana was unethical, as if seeing a lush, vibrant world become a desiccated husk was not evidence enough. Yet many were loathe to give up the lifestyle or power that mana provided. To appease their conscience they learned to harvest mana from stars instead of draining planets, claiming that they would only target stars without sentient life. After all, no one lives on stars...
To be fair, they were too ignorant to know what they were doing. Like children with fire, they were all fascination and not enough knowledge or experience to know fear. They harvested stars, gaining tremendous power; enough to power entire worlds for decades. One of the many things they did not know, however, was that they only managed to harvest the tiniest fraction of the power they released by destroying stars. Another was that they did not understand the implications of mana's gravitational force.
It seems obvious in hindsight, I suppose, to say that powering a few worlds for a few decades is nothing compared to powering a dozen planets for billions of years. It also seems obvious that power calls to power, and the simple fact that mana pools into nodes demonstrates the gravitational force of mana. Things such as this, though obvious in hindsight, are often difficult to see in the moment; doubly so if you are blinded by greed or ideology. At any rate, they were overjoyed at the results and began harvesting stars in earnest.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of stars were destroyed, each one having a fraction of its power harvested, and another minute fraction manifesting in the material world as light, heat, and other elements. A infinitesimal percentage of these stars' energy was successfully stored. The energy of all those stars, meant to radiate out over billions of years was released in an instant and no one thought to question how little power they received because what they got was more than they could imagine. They ate table scraps from a feast fit for gods and thought themselves gods for the eating of it. Neither did they think about what would happen to the fabric of space and time as the gravity of these mana dense stars shifted when the energy was displaced.
The changes in the gravitational fields were strong enough to cause ripples in the fabric of space itself, strong enough to create the slightest wobble, a bounce, if you will, at the heart of a black hole, causing a shift in its immense gravity. Like bowling balls rolling to the middle of a rubber sheet, the power coursed through the universe. Because of the vast emptiness of space, much of the potential devastation was avoided, but there were worlds where, as these intense waves of mana passed through, the native mana was stripped away, caught up in the growing swell of power. Most life perished in the wake, but those unlucky few that survived were left as wretched, twisted horrors out of nightmares; devoid of any spark of life but still animate. A crueler fate could not be visited upon a creature. These horrid creatures would later become known as the Phain, but that is another tale.
Usually, these so-called 'black holes' are able to recycle energy back into the universe by ingesting differentiated mana, stripping it of its information. The pure undifferentiated mana would then get routed through channels that we do not completely understand, be reintroduced into the universe, and begin its cycle over again. The power that collected at the heart of this particular black hole, however, was far more than it could take far faster than it could take it. The gravitational shift caused reality to bend creating a 'bubble', caught in between structured rational material reality and its creative chaotic other side. The excess energy collapsing into the black hole became trapped in this bubble., like a great roiling power-filled embolism in the mind of the universe; an embolism waiting to rupture.
What happened instead was as completely unlikely as it was unanticipated. As the 'bubble' filled with mana, it's gravity continued to increase. The 'weight' of it increasingly bent reality into this other place, which we will call the Dream. The Dream is a realm of both chaos and creation and, as mana flows within the landscape of 'reality', great currents of elemental energy flow through the landscape of the Dream. As the 'bubble bounced' into the Dream, the immense gravity of it drew these rivers towards it like a giant sticky ball, creating its own connection to these elemental currents.
Here in this pocket, the energy from all that life swirled and mingled, still undifferentiated, and as the system re-stabilized, so did this mana, planting the seeds for the planet that would become Duende. Over time the planet grew and echoes of the mana's past became manifest in its very nature. The vortexes where the six elemental currents connect became it's 'suns' known as the Titans, radiating their light onto the world. Three moons also formed around it and over time became known as the Three Sisters.
Duende is a place unlike any other; a world in the space between structure and chaos where both focused thought restless dreams can become manifest reality. The planet where odd lifeforms, familiar but not the same, came into existence and grew to abundance brought about by the residual memory of the mana brought into this tiny pocket. The pocket at the heart of the universe that pulses and reaches out to draw new life into its domain even while excluding all other. Duende, born unlike any planet, caught between realms, touching all but part of none. It is here, on this world unlike any other, that our stories unfold.
Comments