Eternity is not Immortal

Nothing is truly immortal, save that which we leave behind us, written into the sands of time. Eventually the winds pick up those sands and blow them around the world, sometimes they will be obliterated by the footsteps of later and greater beings, but for a while they will stay, etched into the fabric of history. All a man can do is to ensure that they leave as large a footprint as possible.   Such is the fate of any man in the Immortality universe, whether he be a lowly fisherman on the tiniest island of Atlas, all the way up to the greatest commander of the arms. Beings throughout the Orion arm fight each other, trade with each other, and love each other with these rules and so shall they all be forgotten. This is the wasting expanse of the universe where all is for nought, but whilst they are still here, oh, how they struggle against the flow.   The woes of the time are many and varied.   The Moon known as Sumnia has declared their independence from the Dionian Corporation. They have waged unholy warfare against one another across the depths of the stars, watering the airless waste with the blood of the innocent, as nuclear fire and biologically engineered death steals lives from the worlds and moons between.   On worlds coreward of earth, the Chinese United Protectorates suffer one of the worst famines in history as millions starve to death under the relentless suns. Militant populaces rise up against their governments, blaming them for the lack of food. Rioting is rife, and the government is kept in power only by its police force.   The twin worlds of Tau Ceti are beset by extinction level meteorites, the planet is entering the season of fire as the ground itself ignites and flows like water. As the nomadic tribes flee the sky darkens with ash by each day as more and more pieces of sky plummet to the ground. And so does life go on for the tribes, for they have faced the season of fire before, as they have with the seasons of water and sand and sky, so did their ancestors and so shall they.   On the worlds of the Korok, airless rocks and moons devoid of life, this reptilian and alien people continue their secluded and quiet lives. All the while their offspring fight and die in a war they have no stake in.   The frozen ball of Krios stares up at the sky like a blind man and down below on its surface the inhabitants of the research stations cannot believe their instruments. Beneath the ice, beneath the snows and dirt and limitless leagues, beneath rock and magma thicker than the imagination of man there stirs what could be haltingly labelled ‘life’.   One star bears the brunt of the entire Dione/Sumnia war; Sigma Tarses. Around it there flies no planets, yet it has claimed enough bodies to populate one.   At the barest edge of the galactic plane Narekian priests squat in their caves, the runes and signs telling them the same message over and over again, endlessly repeating. The dead yell it, the living whisper of it. They see it in their sleep and upon the rising of the sun when they wake.   The darkness of space is not kind, and humanity hasn’t made it any brighter, but small lives burn amidst the chaos and struggle onward, their dreams bright for promise of when all this will end and be forgotten once more.