0 A.S. (102 B.C.)

The night sky shimmered with a brilliant purple. The stars were fogged over by the luminance of the purple cloud. It was said that no one slept that night. All anyone could do was watch as the lavender sky descended towards them.

Where did it come from? No one knew. It appeared first as a glow on the horizon, but within a moment it had covered the skies. 

Purple was a color of extravagance, of wealth, of royalty, but now it coated everything in sight. The water glimmered with it. The buildings radiated with the color. In the pockets of shadow on people’s faces—purple.

Was it a gift from the gods? Yes, that is what some people believed, and for those regions, they seemed to be at peace. Others believed it to be a curse. They believed it to be the sign of the end, and so chaos ensued in those regions.

Over the course of the next several months, it coated the ground in a purple snow. It was in the soil and in the water that plants and animals began to ingest the particles of nebular dust.

When the first patch of wheat glowed like fire in the night, the odd happenings became more prevalent.

There were children who could ignite flame with their fingertips, who bled fire and ash. It wasn’t here or there either. Every child born worldwide possessed these new abilities. 

The children had been blessed by the stars—that was what people said. The children had been cursed by the stars—that was what other people said. So some children met praise, and others met execution. In execution they found that piercing the heart made them explode.

The new generation persevered. The fearful were bound to submission as the children became stronger.

Brown, red, orange, and then yellow was how the hierarchy started. Each color was more powerful than the former. You could see it in their eyes. And eventually the people with brown eyes died out, the people without powers.

Be it from disease, starvation, or from a need to inherit the stars, the stellar people left their homes. They could survive in the void of space and found taste in the nebula that still surrounded the planet. From their feast the next generation of stars was born with shades of blue in their eyes and in their blood. These new stars could navigate through space with bridges and rifts, taking them from one nebula to the next.

A stellar network was formed. A stellar civilization.

In space, when someone went nova, when someone exploded, they didn’t always die. Sometimes they would come back with a pale gray flame or with an unsteady bright white flame that killed anyone who touched it. There was only one known man to control the bright white flame. He fled.

Questions were posed about novas, if they provided the next step in stellar evolution. Questions were posed about the event that gave humanity the power of the stars in the first place. 

A new class of star was born: purple. The same color the sky glowed on that day. Would she be the answer to these stellar questions? If only science were the prevailing issue of the new times.