The vast expanse of the universe is home to the greatest displays of raw power. Colossal giants of fire and fusion burn and simmer out there, and one by one, they each come to a violent end.
A star explodes. In it's wake is left a maelstrom of light and solar energy, seemingly caught. Snagged and unable to disperse, this cluster wrestles with cosmic forces beyond our ken, almost as if it is alive.
But it isn't, is it.
Is it?
I AM ALIVE it thinks. Thinking is new. It has never had thoughts before. It has never had, period, before. The experience of experience is the first experience this energy has ever experienced, and it is most certainly inexperienced in handling the experience. Coming into being through the violence of a celestial explosion is one thing, but to come to realize that? This is found to be very frightening, and brings about another experience.
Fear.
Fear of what? What do I fear?
Well I think, and I'm still new to this, that I fear life.
Why would I fear life? What IS life?
Where am I?
Indeed, the entity has taken several lightyears to manage communication with itself. In this time it has been hurtling through space as breakneck speed and has found itself in a location that was not the one it was in when it arrived at life. Now it was somewhere else. This was a struggle as movement was disorientating to the entity that was only just coming to terms with orientation.
A few more lightyears of 'internal' debate and questioning, the entity had discovered movement. It found itself able to propel through the vast emptiness that was the space it inhabited, and it verymuch enjoyed doing so. Over time, it had even begun to take on a form. Something that you or I would recognize as some kind of whale. A grossly incandescent cloud of gasses and refracted light, swimming through space like a wailord.
It only takes a few aeons for this entity to discover that there are masses forming as it swims. They start from almost nothing. Tiny specks of dust and ice, and they collide and grow, until they became large enough that they begin to PULL others to them. The wailord notices that the larger ones grow to be very hot at their cores. They become molten balls of stone and gas, encased in the very same, kept cool by the void of space.
Wailord likes this.
Having observed a few more of these phenomena, the entity made it's very fist conscious decision: Investigate these masses. Some of them were as big as it was, and some bigger still. It was all very exciting and new, and the entity swam closer to the one it had chosen. As it did this however, something else happened, and the ice which encased the mass melted, and covered the surface of the newly born planet in liquid.
Water was made.
Time marched on as the entity observed the planet being drawn to another star, much like the one which had birthed this new life form. It observed closer and closer, and noticed things. The planet's surface was overrun with a growth of some kind. Green and leafy in places, it grew and grew and spread across the virgin world, and the entity noticed that it would grow strongest nearer to itself. It gave way to the understanding that what it was observing was it's own doing. It's mere presence had caused these events to occur, and the entity felt itself the mother of this world.
The mother.
Oh joy! This was all so very exciting! The mother had only been given life a few light-centuries ago, and it had now given life to a frozen rock! It swam a victory lap around the now green and blue planet, gently pulling at it, throwing it into a spin. Yes, it was a joyous occasion.
And this occasion was then marred by The mother's failure to notice the approaching star. It was large. Truly massive, a hulking beast of a star, drawing everything near into it's gaping fiery maw. It spelled the end for the little planet The mother had just bestowed with life of it's own, and it was a very distressing discovery.
But The mother was having none of it. It knew not what to do, but it had to spare this planet from the enroaching barbecue at all costs. Thinking without thinking, The mother dove into the star, throwing it's spectral and gaseous form against the burning colossus, in an attempt to perhaps push it away from it's little planet.
The result was no such effect. The result was the death of that star.
Stars had never had to be prepared for the event of a sentient nebula diving into them. It wasn't something that came up with any regularity on the calendar of any celestial body.
The fact that said event then caused the star that was unlucky enough to suffer the wrath of the nebula to explode would be a matter of speculation for all eternity. Stars came to the conclusion that it was an anomalous event, in the chaos of the universe, and it was to be diligently ignored.
But the little planet, who was saved by the actions of The mother, would suffer for it. With no star nearby, and no mother, the little planet quickly froze over. It took mere centuries for the little world of green and blue, of life and liquid, to be frozen and encased in solid ice and death. Even it's rotation was stopped.
And so it sailed through the emptiness of space, forever marked by the once vibrant presence of life, now not simply a frozen rock, but an empty husk of something which was once the bearer of life.
Had the planet a consciousness like The mother, it might have noticed that the remains of the star which had almost consumed it were not done moving.
