Chapter One

She lived in between, in the spaces imagined by people but never conceived by human hands, the birthing spot of the idle thought and the resting place of complicated abstracts, an ethereal world in which nothing was tangible but everything was real. Here, no object was entirely defined by its definition; even she was not entirely female, although she would be described as Feminine. She drifted in and out of states of being, tossed randomly along the waves of Matter, but that was the nature of the place - nothing was permanent here, not even the shape of her form or the color of her skin. The trees, the floating paths, the very air shifted and pulsed like a living creature, thrumming with the rhythm of a golden heartbeat. She lived with unspoken poetry, dreamed songs, and whimsical fantasies, a hodgepodge of unconsciousness drained from the floating blue planet just past her arm’s reach.

Her thoughts were constantly turned towards Earth. If she stood on the edge of her world, looking through the effervescent lights and darks with her glorious shining eyes, she could see everything. Her insatiable curiosity led her to spend eons gazing through the lives of humans, silently contemplating their actions and existence. She was partly interested because of the slight sense of self-awareness that she possessed, and she knew that the mental workings of these creatures had created her and the place in which her immediate form was suspended; she also knew that they had no idea that their ancestors had been a part of the nebula that begot Earth, and had created their planet, even their own species, through the incalculable power of their minds. She often wondered what they could have achieved had their race not forgotten this.

Despite all of her observations upon humanity, and despite the occasional memory of her own origin, she didn’t see herself as independent from her surroundings. She was the channel for thought and Feminine focus, not an entity herself; that was one of the first things that changed.

She saw it happen, saw darkness blossom over the Earth in mushroom clouds of devastation. She witnessed the death of every living creature on the planet, felt their shock and terror as they realized that everything they knew was being extinguished. In that moment, for the first time, she felt pain, and it captivated her like nothing ever had - she felt alone, separate, incapable. The foot that rested on the misty waves beneath her was no longer a part of the waves themselves; something inherent within her psyche had been lost. She reached a long dark hand through to the mists of Reality, groping for humanity and the lost planet – through the corners of her eyes she saw a multitude of creatures reaching in a similar fashion, and somehow felt more alone for having been unaware of their existence – and gently fell to the wasteland beyond –