Long Live the Prince

Humankind was thought to be long gone. All that remained were the ashes of a society, buried deep underground – deep under the tungsten structures sprawling from the Earth’s crust; under the kilometer-wide beacons illuminating its surface. After the Sons of Man left the planet, Earth remained uninhabited. Empty. A dull reminder of what could’ve been, but wasn’t.

Earth’s Sun was all but forgotten. No living entity was touched by its rays in billions of years. Once the Sun changed from burning hydrogen within its core to burning hydrogen in a shell around it, the core started to contract and the outer envelope expanded, rapidly turning what used to be Earth’s Sun into a red giant.

The Earth was on its course to be swallowed by what used to be her Sun. They would finally be together. For billions of years they’ve longed for each other; for billions of years they’ve waited. For what seemed to be forever The Sun looked at Terra orbiting around him, looked at her deep blue oceans and her evergreen forests. For billions of years Earth looked at the Sun, nervously waiting for his warm embrace. And after that much time, after that much change had happened in both of them, it was finally time.

The whole galaxy watched as the two celestial bodies fused; there had never been a fusion with passion as strong as theirs, with light as blinding and melodies as harmonious as theirs. Each atom of their composition sang as the former selves of the two bodies decomposed to create one anew. They had waited so long, and they had been through so much. They had seen the birth and death of many species, of many other stars. Their shared memory spanned tens of billions of years, but none of that mattered. What mattered was now. They were finally together.

Old Sun and Earth were no more, but one of the species they used to nurture, thought to have been gone for billions of years, was not. In a distant solar system, one with three thousand planets and millions of moons, a child is born – one of Homo Sapien descent. An heir to the throne of Artha, the foster planet of the human race.

“Long live the prince!” the people chanted.

“Long live the prince!” the King replied.

In the midst of the human extinction, during the uprising of the Sons of Man, a lone capsule was sent into the burrows of the Universe with no clear destination – soaring through space and time at incredible speeds. On board there were symbols and landmarks of human history – books, records, technology, art, literature, and a couple cryogenized human embryos. Anything more and the Sons of Man would have noticed, anything less and humanity would have had no chance of surviving. It is still unknown how those first embryos came to become full fledged humans, but there are tales of an ancient Machine, older than the Universe herself, that guided the capsule and nurtured them, helping them inhabit Artha. When prince Solis was born, they were on their 15th generation of Arthian humans, nearly 60.000 people inhabited the planet.

In the very center of the young kingdom, on a white marble pedestal, so tall that it could be seen from any corner of the kingdom, stood the capsule that brought humans to Artha – a reminder of history; a reminder of strength; a reminder of what was no more. They had much to learn about their former selves, much to grow as a people, but with time, they knew that would happen. Earth was indeed gone, but its inhabitants, not. They, against all odds, continued their journey through future history – their journey through this Universe, that is as strange as it is beautiful. They looked up at the sky and said “We’ll get there again, someday. Maybe not right now, maybe not a hundred years from now, but someday. We shall bring our species to the glory we were once promised. Us – humans – how fragile and limited in nature, yet how infinite in potential and passion.”