Everything moves in cycles. The sun, the moon, all the stars, the tides, the seasons, and yes, even us. At times, the Earth moves towards the sun, and others, away from it.

At the dawn of human existence, man gravitated to the stars. Like moths to a flame, we were drawn to its comforting light. We began to mold our lives around the phases of the moon, and our lunacy grew. We constructed our calendar on the spin of the stars, the delicate placement of the planets, and the golden glow of the crescent moon. For a time, that was all we had to ward off the dark. We planned thousands of years in the future, wishful thinking of our impending doom.

As we dawned into a new era, we thought ourselves free of the pull of the stars. Electricity brought light to the darkness. Our cycles became fused to the sun, where we spent our days at work, turning our backs on the night sky.

Instead of counting eons, we began to count work weeks. Weekends. Eight hour shifts. Half hour breaks. Ten minute meals. Unreciprocated glances. We grew distant. We forgot where we came from. Time grew shorter. Chaos returned to our lives.

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It wasn’t until we learned the true impact of the celestial bodies that our gaze returned to the sky. Long neglected by man and woman alike, the terrible spin of the zodiac and the heavenly bodies threw our lives into further tumult. Mercury fell into retrograde, the seas revolted, and darkness consumed.

Through the pitch, we built ships to carry us to unseen shores. We intended to reverse the reversal. We would leave a path of destruction in our wake, destroying entire stars to eliminate the constellations sewn between them. A last ditch effort to reclaim the reason in our lives. We would do as we always had, and go to war.

As Earth slipped from our grasps from the port windows below us, we knew we would never see it again. We had made a commitment to blood and dust. Either we would claim a new home, free from the chains that bound us, or we would face our end with sword in hand. We scorched the path behind, blazed forth on our glorious trail, leaving nothing to return to.

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But we had miscalculated. The stars were not as they appeared to us those thousands of years before. They had shifted, as had we, and our primitive technology had left us charging to the wrong orbit. We arrived, a war party setting siege to a coast, and we left no survivors. We were the great equalizers, returning all to its primordial state.

We had no idea the chaos we were sewing. We were not capable to comprehend the disorder we had wracked. That’s when the infighting broke out. Soon there was no army, or allies, or enemies; all that remained was me. Man waged war against his brother and sisters, determined to be the only one left on the cinder.

We could not have been less prepared for the real assault. A rip in the fabric of spacetime slid into our stars while we were too preoccupied to notice. It did not consider us as sentient beings, but as resources. We fell into the slipstream, were pulled along by the undertow, and those who surfaced were the least lucky of all.