Unlike the plains, the forest shielded Alaya from the light of the skies. Here the shadows ran deep except where little strips and splotches happened to grace the floor. Out in the plains islands of grass popped from the earth and split the dry rivers rather cleanly. Occasionally bits of fallen grasses or small twigs littered the ground. But here in the forest, the entire floor was nothing but mulched leaves, branches, stones, and exposed roots.


    The scents here were different too. Wind over the plains carried the pollen of the grasses, the fresh scent of rain and loosened earth. Mildew, mold, and piquant rot added themselves as a thick layer of redolence to the atmosphere of the forest. Something sweeter clung to the air here, not decay… Alaya couldn’t actually identify the scent.


    Finally, the aural landscape here was a separate environment entirely. When the winds blew across the plains, they played a hissing reed chorus. But the forest had a thousand additional players. Each leaf, each branch, interacted with the others to produce a cacophony of music floating down to Alaya. Birds and insects sang their lives into the air too, but that was hardly different from the plains. It was nothing like the incessant hum of a ventilation system, air reprocessors made a regular sound which only deviated when they were about to stop working.


    The functional difference between the forest and the plains, was that she could walk beneath the canopy here looking for both the husks of locusts and for the eggshells she needed. Talani had spoken of biomes other than the swamp or plains, so Alaya knew about wild forests, in theory. Most of that knowledge came from sims of the martian farmlands.


    She’d not really expected to find neat rows of trees with manicured walkways between them. There were no straight paths through this forest. Alaya, making use of Talani’s lessons, followed a game trail through the trees.


    According to her, the beasts stuck to trails they considered safe, which would mean other animals might do the same. Where the deer, foxes, or whatever denizens of the forests made the trail in the first place trod, Alaya had a better chance of finding her goals.


    The locusts were the easiest, after a fashion. She spotted a discarded carapace just out of reach, stuck to the bark of a tree. With only one hand, her chances of climbing the tree were not good. “Use a tool, boop.” Even without her father’s words in her head, Alaya would have figured out a solution in short order. But with her father’s advice, she picked up a long branch fallen right off the trail and used it to knock the locust husk away. In the process, of course she crushed it and lost both the wings and the largest section of the locust’s shell.


    “Fuck!” Her outburst, the first since walking into the forest, sent a flock of birds in the distance into the air to escape. “Ugh, fuck again!”


    As much as she could, Alaya noted the birds’ launch points. Those were the most likely places for her to find eggs. Having crushed the first locust body, she set out to find a second, carefully watching the trunks as she passed.


    The next husk she spotted was even higher on the trunk. This time she set her robe down, with garlic and snakeskin atop. As carefully as she could with a single hand, she nudged the end of the stick over to the bit of discarded chitin. This time it fluttered to the ground falling almost exactly into place.


    She couldn’t help but cheer, sending the birds and nearby beasts into a renewed panic.


    Once again, Alaya marked the point from which the birds launched. Without her implants Alaya wasn’t able to record those points and track them automatically. Doing this as a baseline was harder than she’d ever imagined. Growing up without implants, she felt like she should have been able to handle this. And yet…


    Wandering through the woods looking for bird nests or fallen eggshells was harder than she could have conceived. Piles of leaves dotted the floor, as if placed here and there by some invisible caretaker. How those piles would have fallen into place without interference from a person was beyond Alaya. Talani’s lessons hadn’t covered that. Nor had they involved the specifics of hunting for bird eggs.


    What she had learned about birds was fairly basic. They roosted in the trees where they also nested. No way could Alaya climb the trees where she’d marked the bird’s ascent. But she did stop beneath those spots and check for shells or fallen eggs.


    Nothing.


    Nighttime closed in on her with the same subtlety it did with on a void ship wth an eccentric or uncaring captain. A long time ago Alaya had stowed away on a derelict shipping vessel with Gaz. If the captain on that ship had paid more attention to his sensors or O2 scrubber load, he would had suspected stowaways, even with Gaz’s chassis working overtime to augment their O2 supplies. As a result of the captain’s ignorance, Alaya had been forced to rely on Gaz for the time. Back then Alaya had still been baseline. The days squished into each other aboard that transport in part because the temps and the light levels never deviated.


    The forest was almost identical in that way. Neither particularly cold nor warm, the atmosphere gave Alaya little hint as to the time. Same with the light. As she moved deeper into the wood, the little streaks of light grew less and less frequent. Exhaustion drove Alaya to sleep before the dark.


    One of those piles of leaves became her bed. Still relying on Talani’s lessons, Alaya used her branch to break up the leaves and scare away any snakes or other predators who might have already been using the leaf pile. Then she crawled in, shoveled the leaves over herself and snuggled in for the warmest night of sleep she’d had in weeks. Maybe the warmest since coming to the Summerlands. She dreamed of Gaz the whole night.


    Alaya started awake at the tail end of what might have been a nightmare or a bittersweet dream. She bade Gaz farewell as she awoke, tears speckling her cheeks. The hazy grey light of the forest welcomed her back to her labors today. Before she set out, Alaya unwrapped her bundle and checked on the snakeskin, garlic, and locust. They were all intact and present still. She checked the gold markings on her thin rock: still one more thing: a shell from something which broke its own egg.


    The first time she’d spotted a legitimate eggshell in her life was that afternoon. It lay on its end in a small pile of leaves. The top was missing, but the base was whole. Alaya searched the area for the egg’s former resident, but nothing hinted at the bird’s departure or presence.


    “Hello little egg.” It had almost been a full day since Alaya had last spoken, when she’d crushed her first target locust husk. She’d spotted several more along the tree trunks and knocked a few of them into her robes.


    A surplus of other materials meant Alaya could afford to experiment. She gingerly picked up the eggshell, noting a bunch of red blood-like goo gathered around the side. Rather than leave the forest, Alaya spent time clearing away a patch of open ground, plucked scales from the snake skin and selected an fat little garlic bulb from her collection, and one of the locust husks.


    Not really sure how this was supposed to work, Alaya gathered the four materials in the center of her cleared ground and chanted the words from the golden script over them. She knelt on the ground with her eyes closed and waited.


    For nothing.


    Shaking herself out and cursing her own mind, Alaya bowed her head and prayed over the four items in the chocolate brown dirt. Again she spoke the words and… nothing.


    “Fuck.” Alaya checked her list a second time. Locust wing, check. Snake scale, check. Alium, check. It had to be her egg. Maybe the dried blood on the side of the egg meant something had broken into the egg and eaten the baby inside.


    Eww. People used to eat these things themselves, but was there supposed to be blood?


    Alaya had no idea how this worked, so she set the eggshell aside and bundled up the rest. “Back to hunting.” Whispering low this time, Alaya did not send any birds fluttering into the air.


    None of Talani’s lessons had specified the finding of birds or their eggs. That would have been too helpful. Thus, she spent another several hours searching through the woods before she collapsed into a new pile of leaves.


    Thirst had started to press against her body again. It had almost been two days since Alaya had found water. And she hadn’t brought any with her, which meant she needed to think about whether to press on or to go back and find her stream again.


    Upon checking her own trail, Alaya encountered a whole new problem: she was lost. Game trails meandered through the trees haphazardly. There was no way, looking back at those trails, for Alaya to tell which way she’d come or which way she needed to go. One thing Talani had stressed was that all animals needed water. With the volume of birds and the massive signs of beasts in the area, there had to be water somewhere. But the chittering leaves and other sounds drowned it out.


    That’s an ironic turn of phrase. She chuckled at her own thoughts and knelt. Might as well pray.


    She spoke the words again, thanking the Verse for what she’d already discovered. And asking for guidance to water and to the rest of her ingredients.


    This time, when Alaya opened her eyes, a little red fox hunched down with its belly almost touching the ground. It eyed her warily, as if it had been wandering over a crossroad in her path and frozen when it spotted her.


    Alaya held herself still, not as still as she could have managed with a cyborg frame, but incredibly still nonetheless. Lacking any sense of time, Alaya could only guess at how long it took for the fox to relax enough to spring away, heading left across Alaya’s path.


    It made a grinding little bark as it did, either mocking her or inviting her to follow. Regardless of which, Alaya suspected the fox was a sign from the Verse. There was no reason to ignore its appearance. So she stood and turned to track the fox through the forest.


    The ground quickly turned rocky and broken, like some ancient quarry man had come with a pick to smash the rocks and claim the choice pieces for himself. Mother had taught Alaya about quarries, about why ancient man had relied on them. Analogous to asteroids, those ancient places had helped determine where humanity would settle. Too small for an actual quarry, the walls of this little valley rose up just higher than Alaya’s head.


    When the game trail faded into the grey scrabble and large flat chunks of stone, Alaya froze. Already too lost to matter, she still hesitated before continuing on. “What else am I going to do?” Fair enough. Silence fell over the forest at her words, the bird and insects paused to see what danger Alaya posed to them. And their silence gave her auditory space to pick up a different sound. It was hard to say exactly what was different about this particular hissing phrase. Similar in many ways to the brook she’d found in the plains, there was chortling thread hidden in this music.


    Once again, Alaya prayed. Could she pray too much? Was that even possible?


    When she finished and opened her eyes, the sound of the stream came even clearer to her ears. There was no doubt some source of water flowed nearby and all she had to do was find it.


    Navigating the rocks in her bare feet was more treacherous than she could have ever guessed. Bloody footprints marked her trail as she hopped across the clear parts of her path. Rocks meant fewer trees and more light from the sky. The sun had yet to reach its meridian height, but it was fast approaching. Half her day was already gone and Alaya was no closer to her egg than yesterday.


    But only a few minutes later, she came upon a massive river. There was nothing like this in her experience. It was so wide, the tree’s canopies weren’t large enough to span its breadth. What burbling and hissing she’d heard came from the roots and shallows nearby where the water formed little whirlpools.


    She stood there staring at the mass of water for longer than she needed. Like many void salts born into the black desert, she’d never seen an ocean. And like her fellows, she’d spent time in sim flying over the impossibly large body of water. But she’d never considered how water came in intermediate forms. The little brook back in the plains could have been a spillway in a poorly maintained station’s water supply. Only a desperate fool would drink from such a spillway. To Alaya, the swamp wasn’t really water at all, just a weird little example of someone spilling an ocean’s contents in among a dying wood farm. Here in the forest though, this river was utterly beyond Alaya’s experience. Water like this in a station would have meant… a disaster. Mind throughly boggled, Alaya set her bundle down absentmindedly and crawled from her stone perch to the nearest part of the bank, where the mud and the green waters swirled together.


    Losing her footing had not even occurred to her as she slipped and fell onto her right side and slid full into the water. No one in the void knew how to swim. Alaya had grown up most of her youth on a cylinder filled with decaying ocean, but the conditions there meant she never saw more than the fetid banks covered with algae and mold. Swimming would have been a death sentence, delaying her death from toxic shock or drowning.


    As result, she panicked when her chest hit the water. Scrambling for purchase on the banks, Alaya sucked in a few mouthfuls of water, which ironically helped her find her footing as she coughed and spat the water back out. Her feet scraped against the river’s floor, which was much closer to the surface than she’d guessed.


    Standing up, Alaya found she was waist-deep water, and red-faced. If anyone had seen her nearly “die” in half a meter of water, she would have been deeply embarrassed. A few seconds after she recovered, dripping wet from the slide, a splash a few meters away wrung a shriek from her throat and sent Alaya scrabbling out of the river and back onto the muddy bank.


    Covered in muck and breathing heavily, Alaya stared at the river banks from where she crouched. Nothing. Again.


    “Fuck you river.” No sooner had she spoken than a large, mottled, many toothed mouth roared out of the water and onto the bank. Cybernetics or no, Alaya moved with the speed of a frightened bunny, cutting her shins and forearms on the stones nearby.


    Water droplets hit her back as the monster from the depths closed its jaws on the space Alaya had been panting. It looked like a nightmare given form: leathery skin, malevolent pock-like eyes, and teeth longer than Alaya’s fingers. Was it growling at her? It’s claws bit into the mud and brought it more fully out of the river and onto the bank, a fact which sent Alaya hopping for still higher ground. It ended its lunge with only half of it three or four meter body out of the river, it’s spiked tail whipping back and forth like one of the fish Alaya had encountered during her sim-dips in the ocean.


    She had no idea what it was. “What the fuck?”


    Slid back into the water, staring at Alaya with hunger. As if to warn her it would be watching, all of its bulk vanished into the murky depths. Except for those two eyes.


    A little gulp of water hardly slaked her thirst. But a near-brush with something big enough to swallow her whole was enough to keep Alaya huddled on the bank of the river, head swiveling to spot the next threat before it surprised her.


    “Fuck you monster.” Instinct led Alaya to check her cybernetics for the beast’s identity, but of course she wasn’t connected to any Net, nor could see call up the functions of her cyber brain. “Fuck me too for that matter.”


    The injuries she’d sustained began to finally hurt as the last bits of adrenaline reacted out of her bloodstream. Muscles and joints ached from the sudden and extreme use, but the scrapes and cuts across her skin burned as if she’d poured cleaning acid on herself.


    Talani’s lessons included a dozen different herbs and plants Alaya might have had on hand, if she’d been looking for those instead of for the ingredients to the mysterious cypher stone. Wishing for things she didn’t have represented a colossal waste of time. Wind blowing against the injuries she’d taken actually soothed some of the burn, though the chill made her aches worse.


    Alaya stood up and watched the water as she grabbed her bundle and followed the river bank downstream. The eyes of the monster followed her for almost two hundred meters. But either she lost sight of them or it gave up and sought different prey. Unconvinced of her own safety, Alaya kept her eyes glued to the river and to the course again as she continued on for a mother solid half a kilometer.


    The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Rocks and broken shelves comprised most of the bank. Opposite her side of the river, it sloped much more gently into the water such that the bank was a veritable wall of tree. No way would Alaya cross that river to confirm her suspicions. What were the chances the water would stay only waist deep? And that meant almost nothing compared to the hungry monster creeping under the surface of the water.


    Another half kilometer later, Alaya’s side of the river grew less pronounced and the slope evened out to the point she could easily step down to the edge like walking off of a loading ramp. It felt a little like a trap, as if some river god or nymph had carefully shaped this place to make it attractive for someone like her to dip her hand in.


    Rather than try it, Alaya outsmarted that nymph. She dumped her materials on a flat broad stone not far from the bank and wrapped her loosely woven robes around a long branch. It was something her father had taught her, a long time ago. Sometimes fresh water pooled at the bottom of pipes or in cisterns which proved impossible to dislodge. She should have tried this first, but she’d been impulsive upon first encountering a river. Dipping the robe into the water using the stick as a handle proved immensely successful. Best of all, no lurking river demons shot out to eat her robes.


    Alaya sucked the water out of her robes, making a displeased face at the taste of her own sweat. It was better than she deserved considering her lack of hygiene and better than a lot of pipe water she’d skimmed over her life.


    Repeating the process several times, Alaya managed to wet her throat and tongue thoroughly and get enough sustenance where she felt confident she could continue on. Evening approached now and Alaya needed to find shelter. What if those river monsters came out at night to hunt?


    No way to know for certain, so she walked a short distance away, cradling her materials in her left hand and her soggy robes in her right armpit. Not quite far enough she couldn’t hear the river’s movement, if she’d gone further, Alaya feared she might lose her water supply.


    Before she fell asleep, Alaya prayed once again. This time she asked the Verse to keep Gaz safe forever, but especially until Alaya got to see her again. A feeling settled over her and for the first time since coming here, she felt certain she would see Gaz alive again.


    When she woke, Alaya was chipper and refreshed. Nothing had stalked about the trunk where she’d hidden in the night.


    Looking up at the top of the trunk, Alaya laughed. A small ring of tiny twigs, fuzz, and dried leaves proclaimed itself a bird nest. A brief pause to listen confirmed the presence of something chirping among those bits of nearly dead plant matter.


    It was too high for Alaya to reach on her own. But she’d already learned how to make a ladder by herself. And granted, the plants here were not the same as the swamp, the process was basically the same. She gathered branches and tough grass shoots and set about weaving. One-handed, the process took her far more than twice as long. But her progress was steady.


    By noon, she had a serviceable, though short ladder. Setting it against the trunk of a tree, Alaya slowly climbed up, afraid the bird-mother might attack her for messing with her eggs or her chicks.


    A few stay feathers clung to the nest, looking nothing like the feathers Alaya expected from sims. Those were always straight and bore stiff, fan-like fronds which gave the whole thing a bladed appearance. What she saw were closer to puffballs with little nubs at the end.


    One egg sat at the side of the nest, unmoving. There was no shell or any indication other birds had hatched out of this nest. Unwilling to wait, Alaya spoke a brief prayer to the Verse and pulled the tiny egg form its roost and cupped it in her hand.


    Again the sims were misleading. She’d expected to find an off-white or even beige shell. Maybe with a little bit of texture to it. But this shell was speckled with dark brown spots, but was otherwise mustard yellow. Was it sick?


    She had no way of knowing, so she clung her right forearm to the ladder and cradled the egg against her chest as she made her way back down. Naturally she lost her footing. Terrified she’d land on her pile of ingredients or on her egg and crush it, she threw herself backwards and curled around her left hand and the egg as much as she could. The fall knocked the wind out of her and she hit her head on the ground.


    Senseless and unable to breathe for a moment, Alaya still managed to keep from shattering her egg as she gasped for air and waited for the sharp agonies to end. They held on for way too long as Alaya panted and heaved. At least she wasn’t sick and hadn’t passed out.


    When she trusted herself enough, Alaya checked her egg and found it un-cracked. Supposedly chickens had once sit upon their eggs to keep them warm and help them hatch. Alaya figured that was the purpose of a nest. If she sat on this egg, she would definitely crush it.


    Struggling upright against the agony in her skull, Alaya examined the tiny egg and decided she could rest it in her palm as long as she was careful not to squeeze it too tightly. When she stood up, Alaya hand to rest her right forearm against the nearby tree, which left indentations in her arm from the mottled bark.


    As camp sites went, this was nearly ideal. Close enough to the water for Alaya to hup there and back in five minutes, the forest floor was covered with discarded dried leaves which would give her plenty of material for a bed. How long would the egg take to hatch? Nothing Talani, mother, or father had taught her gave Alaya the slightest clue. So she sat with her back to the tree and waited with the little egg in her palm.


    Without a cyberbrain, or access to it, she found herself profoundly bored. Moving around risked hurting her egg before it hatched. Staying still was about to drive her batty when a grotesque alarm broke the placid chirping drone of the forest. It sounded like a… howl? The way some void gangers screamed to drive little prickling waves of fear into their victims. Having been hunted before, Alaya was quick to her feet and almost reached her bundle when the second set of howls ripped through her belly.


    Yellow, slitted eyes and slavering maws gathered at the edge of the small clearing around Alaya’stree. She snatched up her bundle and the contents and backed away. The moment she returned to her trunk, three wolves larger than people stalked into the clearing. Growls shook the tree tops and sent waves of terror roiling through Alaya’s body.


    How the hell was she supposed to fight those things with one fucking hand while protecting the ingredients for her trial? How were they so freaking huge?


    So much had happened in the last months. Discovering ancient technologies she’d thought useless, losing her arm, and now fighting to claim some ephemeral freedom from it all. She screamed her fury back at the wolves. And they halted their advance, but bared their teeth at her and snarled with drool dripping from their jaws. There was no way she could have fought them, from their size to the fact there were three.


    Alaya lowered her head, closed her eyes, and prayed. If she was about to be eaten, she didn’t want to see it. Still cradling her egg in her hand, Alaya reached out to the Verse with her heart and whispered just one word: “help.”


    Something trickled across her cheek, atop the crown of her head, then down her neck and back. Blood? Some other fluid? When she opened her eyes, the three wolves had lowered their heads as well, muzzles to the earth and right forepaws bent. Drops of… water? They fell from the sky in little waves, as if some massive piping system vented pressure overhead. Or someone had messed up condensation control. Would the egg get hurt from the water? She covered it with her body as the water falls began in earnest.


    Aboard a station this would have been close to freezing unless a pressurized or heated pipe burst. Such water would not have been warm, but scalding and too dangerous to remain beneath for even a moment. But this invigorated Alaya as the rivulets ran over her body.


    Movement in her hand brought Alaya’s attention back down to the present. “What the…”


    Splattering pops as water droplets hit the ground roared over her, louder than the wolves. But still a soft, squeaky chirp reached her ears. Cracks formed along the eggshell and it began to shake and twitch as if to explode. One flake of shell flipped off onto the base of Alaya’s thumb.


    She ignored the material for her prayer because of the thin little beak poking out of the hole along with a matted bundle of feathers too small and spiked to be real. “What are you?”


    It struggled and cheeped as more and more of the shell came apart. Alaya hooded the baby bird with her trunk, hunching over it to keep the spillage off. Every part of her was drenched save a tiny space where the wee baby bird continued to free herself from the egg.


    Pieces of fractured white lay scattered about as the bird’s tiny feet pushed the lower sections of egg away. It raised it head and gave it’s own version of the wolfish howl. Alaya knew no way to answer herself, but the wolves apparently did.


    All three of them pulled their heads back and let out a harmonic tone which reverberated in Alaya’s chest. She had to steady herself with the stump of her head or risk falling over from the vibrations.


    When the howl ended, the baby bird had fixed its tiny head in the direction of the wolves. It looked ridiculous, black and skinny, except for its base where its legs poked out and the massive bulb of a head. Like a pin from an old bowling game, the kind her father insisted she play with him. Certain wolves would eat baby birds just as they would eat young women, Alaya was not about to release her foundling to the predators.


    Then the waters stopped falling. The sun rose. And the dark clouds covering the sky parted. A vibrant blue bird squawked angrily at Alaya from a spot not a fifth of a meter from her head. Its gaze darted from Alaya’s eyes back to her palm and then back to Alaya. “Is she yours?” The bird squawked again, louder and more forceful this time. “Okay, here you go then.”


    She held her left hand out to the blue bird, who grabbed the baby by her back legs and lifted them both into the sky. Wolves and Alaya both tracked the baby through the air into a tree. Mother settled in, the three wolves approached Alaya, their heads still bowed.


    Expecting them to suddenly attack, Alaya’s whole body tensed at their movement. Each wolf opened its mouth and a different object popped out. The first held a bulb of wild garlic, the second a round disc of snake skin, and the third a locust husk. “What in the Verse?”


    No answer, of course. But she’d made the right choice by not attacking the wolves and praying instead. Alaya carefully clung to a piece of the shell remaining in her left hand as she grabbed the other three ingredients from the wolves and piled them in front of her. She had to stand to retrieve her golden piece of rock and return to the spot where the rest of what she needed was.


    Then she read the words.


    Light. Everything was light. Which meant nothing to Alaya. Mother had taught her basic philosophy, in the absence of the darkness, what meaning had light? A voice echoed her words, trembling out of infinity and speaking directly into her mind.


    “Then let there be darkness.”


    Differentiation changed everything as the verse sped forward, from an explosion so powerful the concussive waves changed the very principles of reality and drove forward the engine of entropy in the form of time. Smaller explosions followed as the nascent mass and energy concentrated together, burst apart and repeated the process. Even without her mental implants, Alaya recognized a logarithmic expansion in the speed of time around her.


    Now instead of light and dark, she stood at the center of an ever-expanding sphere. Most of this world, the new Verse, was inky blackness. Even this early in its birth. And as time plodded ever forward, more and more darkness entered.


    But the light was tenacious, unwilling to concede even the smallest fraction of territory, blazing into life whenever the circumstances arose. Over and over across the newborn reality actual life bloomed into existence, died and its ashes laid the foundation for the next generation.


    A hand, mighty and invisible, reached out and turned her head toward a darkened expanse of the void. Out there, compared to the girth and majesty of the Verse lay a tiny little plane of flashing, spinning little lights. With her attention diverted, Alaya’s focus narrowed in on those lights. On a tiny speck among blazing specs.


    Brown and red dots spun in lazy, eccentric orbits around this sun, who’s yellow-orange glow reminded Alaya of Sol. Where Earth should have spun and bobbed in her rotations, a pair of dirty round balls chased each other, one at the solar Lagrange point of the former. There was no moon or other satellites around either object, so this couldn’t have been Earth and Sol.


    Then the lead planetoid, too small to bear the proper name, began to vibrate and wobble in its orbit. The basics of orbital mechanics showed the L4 point to be unstable. The evidence proved it as the leading object bobbed and vibrated back into its sister.


    The ensuing explosion was bright enough to be seen from the sun and tossed material out into the depths of the solar system. Part of the smaller body was ejected along with parts of the larger. But a substantial portion of the sister object whipped itself around its sibling. Both objects set to spinning, at almost the exact same period, their spins conferred by the same mechanical inevitability as that which set the Verse into motion in the first place.


    I just witnessed the truth birth of the Earth.


    It became apparent unquestionable when the larger of the two bodies cooled, the gases and compounds trapped by its gravity and magnetosphere condensed into liquid forms. For the first time in history, Alaya witnessed a blue Earth.


    She could not say precisely when life sprung up among the waters. Nor could she say when it differentiated into multi-cellular organisms. But she could see the changes wrought across the surface of the globe as the methane-dominant atmosphere yielded to one more favorable to her kind of life.


    In the span of relative seconds, the Earth turned impossibly green. Ocean-life, now complex enough for nerves to form, for large bodies to emerge from the seas, stepped upon land for the first time. Insects rose up from the soil as if planted there by seed-ships eons in the past. Life teemed on the Earth, swelled to the breaking point and receded in its own tidal rhythm.


    From her vantage point, Alaya enjoyed an impossible sight: massive dinosaurs, larger in some cases than a cruiser, stomped across the surface of the Earth or swam through her seas. Feathers sprang up as those dinosaurs slowly changed, their thickened hind legs giving way to something more akin to that of the little bird she’d released to her mother. Never in her entire history had the Earth born so many living souls upon her surface. It looked to Alaya, like a golden age of life.


    Over her shoulder a massive asteroid, larger by far than anything but a Loop station or generation ship, flung itself toward the pregnant planet. Alaya knew, from her mother’s lessons, what this was: Chicxulub.


    Compared to the impact with her sister body which formed the moon, this asteroid was a tiny handheld pistol to the planetoid’s plasma canon. Still, the explosive plume rose out from the Earth’s surface almost as far as her diameter, once again spraying the Earth’s matter over the solar system and into the outer planets. Millions of years later, explorers wound find fragments from the Chicxulub collision on Saturn’s moon, Titan.


    When mother had taught Alaya how absolute the devastation had been, Alaya had scarcely believed her. Within hours oceans had engulfed most of the continents of the world, spreading their killing waters across the planet. Not long after clouds of sulphuric ash choked the skies and the oceans turned nearly white, then vanished under the black clouds of death which choked out all but a tiny fraction of life on the planet. Not since primitive bacteria began spewing oxygen into the air had the world’s biospheres collapsed so completely.


    An eye-blink of time passed and the cloud cover faded over a world locked in ice and snow. Molten rock, still red and angry from the power of the asteroid’s impact, blew gouts of steam into the air when the roiling seas hit.


    Life clung to the planet tenaciously though. For some reason Alaya then thought of her missing hand, though the significance escaped her in the moment. Time shot forward and life surged, space had opened up for new creatures.


    Some, the last remnants of the massive thunder lizards who’d stomped across the infant Earth, shrank, grew wings, and took to the skies. Others, already tiny and wrapped in the first fur to grace the planet’s timeline scurried and pecked out their niches as they spread across the Earth with the speed and reach of a viral infestation.


    They branched out incredibly wide, claiming every bit of room left by the death of their predecessors. Before Alaya could so much as sigh in wonder, the new mammals had slipped back into the oceans, spread across every biome of the Earth, and into the air.


    Then humanity split off from the mass. Where, for the longest time, the only fire upon her surface had been from celestial cataclysms or faults in the terrestrial crust, now tiny little fires grew up and sent trails of smoke meandering into the heavens. These early humans were squat, hairy, and as varied as the first mammals themselves.


    Before long a single dominant group rose up. Alaya had expected something akin to her maiming here: a pogrom of death and destruction waged by her ancestors against their competitors. But rather than that, she witnessed a strange melding. Early sapiens bread with neanderthals, denisovans, and more to produce the first true humans.


    A great fire rose up in the center of the first human settlements, a bonfire intended to light the whole Earth, born of first humanity’s complete misunderstanding of the cosmos. There, Alaya’s attention focused to a tiny point and narrowed down to where a woman stood before the fire, an auroch-head dress lent her its menacing silhouette. Other than that mask, the woman wore only black paint, each stroke part of a larger beast scrawled across her skin. Strands of… something connected Alaya to this woman. They felt almost like invisible lines of electricity, informing Alaya of the woman’s intent as she raised her own lips to the heavens and howled.


    She prays.


    Was this the first prayer? Or had humanity been praying from the beginning? Masses of people threw their own heads back in answer to the priestess’s cry and howled in harmony with her. In the outer edges of the fire, where the first canine ancestors of domestic dogs lurked, more howls joined the crush of humanity.


    The woman chopped off her own right hand and tossed it into the flame. Her blood and the limb sent the fires roaring high into the sky, all but touching the paucity of clouds floating there. Her face beaded with sweat and gripped in the rictus of agony, the woman ignored the fount of blood pouring from her arm and bent down over a clay bowl. She crushed a series of ingredients in the bowl and chanted a familiar set of syllables.


    Fire leaped from the the pit and followed the trail of her blood back as if it were oil. This time, the woman screamed as fires blazed from her eyes, mouth and ears. Those flames too rose up into the sky and brushed the feet of the gods.


    Before her screams ended, the flames had formed a plasma-like hand. Fingers of flickering blue danced as the woman stared at them and continued her chant. In what must have been an full hour of intense agony, the woman chanted over and over as her hand reformed. It was different from her original right hand in that the lines marking her palm were fine, almost invisible. And where her skin had been clay-dark to begin with, her hand was neatly coal-black now. Ash fell from her fingers as she flexed them and bent down upon her knees to pray.


    Not once had Alaya understood the strange words the people she’d watched spoke. Not until now.


    “By the powers of the Verse, embodied in the gods, may all who come after benefit from my sacrifice.”


    Alaya furrowed her brow at what she heard. Sacrifice? Her unspoken question was answered as the woman jumped bodily into the bonfire, consumed in a single flash.


    This time a winged figue, blazing like the mythical phoenix roared out of the flames with a screech into the air. No longer embodied, the woman’s arms flapped once as she circled overhead and swept across the assembled groups of people. Here and there, bits of her fiery essence fell upon one of those watching, who dropped and entered a kind of vacant trance.


    What had she done to them?


    Alaya had not expected an answer, but the phoenix woman banked and came face to face with Alaya. “I have marked them and their line as belonging to the Verse. Like yourself.”


    “What?”


    The woman’s fiery mask contorted into a grin. “The Verse Herself decreed this. Even you, lost to the fin, lost to the hoof, and lost to the wing, still belong to the Verse. None can flee from their legacy forever, no matter how far they fly.”


    Flames washed over Alaya, sending the sensation of burning across her very mind… no, her soul. A transcendental concept Alaya had never believed in blazed as bright and clear within her heart as the birth of the Verse and the death of the first priestess.


    When Alaya opened her eyes, she was covered with moisture and sweat. She shivered not from the cold, but from the now fading agonies sparking across her nerve channels. Before she lost consciousness, she managed to focus on a strange set of lights flickering in the center of her vision: a hand-shaped flame cavorted before her, as if greeting a long-lost friend.