Mother Nature is our mother. Her love goes beyond compassion, beyond heartfelt remorse or sharing in our joy. Her care can heal all wounds; her delicate fingers weave the sweetest tale. But she is also curious, dangerous, volatile. She is a scientist. A creator. Her experiments result in lucid dreams and moonbows, conjoined twins and evergreens. She is the grand inventor of things useful, evil, beautiful, wild. But no one, however grand, is without enemies.

She began in almost perfect darkness, a small drop of color twisting and falling through zero gravity and dark velvet. However, she was not alone in the great expanse of silent space. As she stared and blinked, the colors of the universe cleared before her blurry, newborn eyes. And soon after this she discovered her power to create.

She began to create a great number of things, all uneven and unstable, with shifting gravities and ion storms. She was much like a toddler with a lump of clay, prodding and bending. A millennium went by and she experimented. Her first perfect creation was a single sphere.

Her sphere was barren, its gravity too dense for even the dust to fly up in clouds as the cosmic winds passed it by. So she shaved away at the gravimetric stress with her fingernails, until a good amount was gone. Now the dusts flew freely. And during this time she worked on her second creation.
A tree.
She ran her ragged nails down its trunk to make uneven grooves, and cut its leaves using most steady of cosmic rays. She attached the leaves with thin pipes of liquid, and it was finished. She wove the tree’s roots into the soil of her planet with a glittering needle.








Pleased with her tree, she proceeded to create more plants, of all types and sizes. She pulled colors from the passing nebulae and made a paste of color and light and scent, which she used to tint the flowers. She stretched the vines between her slender fingers, folded each crease in the palm fronds, and pressed flat the broad maple leaves between the polar fields of gigantic stars.

She soon realized she needed a helper, to aid with the care of her many plants. She searched the nearby solar systems, looking for a non-orbiting celestial. Soon she found young Sun, a small yellow star. He offered to light her world, but only for half of her chosen time cycle. The rest of the time he was needed elsewhere in the galaxy. Nature agreed.


Soon Nature desired an entity more complex than a plant. She toiled in her galaxy for years, looking for a solution.
And she created a brain. It was a sort of positronic brain, at first. Android. Mechanical.
But she saturated it with organic cells until it grew organic itself. She was pleased with her creation. She next created a carbon-based system not unlike that of her plants, but surrounded the device with layers of delicate tissue that grew over the pipes and tubes until it completely encased them.

She needed a form for her organism to take.
She molded a bird.
She gave it wings, with a beak and hollow bones.

She was satisfied with her creations. She observed her planet, and her plants, and her bird. Soon however, she longed to again invent and create. She longed to traverse universes other than her own. So she left Tebra – a goddess – to watch over her world.

She hesitated for a while at the edge of her home universe, examining the many astronomical wonders it contained. But she had seen them all before.
So she traveled beyond the bounds of her own universe and slipped into the time-space continuim. She flowed rapidly through the continuim, careful to smooth out any wrinkles she created on the fabric of time as she entered or exited the stream.

She lingered in the netherworlds and the alternate universes for millions of years; examining, labeling, testing. She caught and bottled colors that only exist in eleven dimensions. She learned how to tune the celestials and play the Music of the Spheres. She watched the birth of a civilization, and helped a young boy find his soul mate. She chased alien dreams and nightmares, folded them, and put them into a box. She soaked a cloth in a cloud of gaseous creatures and wrung them out into a lead jar. She built a crystal bridge spanning a small solar system and wove a gravimetric field to encase a liquid planet. She ate the fruit of the black hole and the quasar, spitting out their heavy seeds into the heart of a dying star. And she created a deadly weapon of lasers and metal.

When she returned to her own world she was happy, for she had seen so many new things and she was eager to come home and invent using the things she had seen and collected in her travels. But once she reached her planet she grew furious, for in the time that she had been gone Tebra had brought civilization to her planet.
But the peoples Tebra had brought were not at all like the Sepan of Tar’eum or the humans of Earth or the Orkonians of the Three Brothers. These people were dangerous, with an irregular and lurching evolution that endowed them with powers beyond their control. They were separated and fearful, violent and lawless.
Their minds were overwhelmed with their own strength.
A race of invincible people. Omnipotent.
Mind control, telekinesis. Super strength, invisibility. Flight. The power to kill, the power to bring back from the dead. Invincibility, and super speed. Telepathy. Time control.
A neighboring civilization had begun a war. Nature’s planet was blasted with fiery bombs and laser missiles from the starships that surrounded it.
Flame and fear consumed it.
The people of the planet set up their own weapons, launching biogenic missiles that attached to the attacker’s ships and infected the crew and blew out the circuitry. They ignited pockets of androlium gas in their atmosphere, blowing up approaching ships and making their own air toxic in the process.
On the surface of the planet, civilians were dragged from the streets into filthy military labs and used as subjects for experimentation with bio warfare or resistance armor. They were exposed to extreme heat and cold, and fatal diseases were injected into their systems after they were pumped full of immuno–drugs. They were shot at, placed in unsolvable mazes, and caged. They were cut open and blended with experimental bio-armor.
Respirators shielded her people’s mouths, armor covered their bodies, and helmets protected their heads. A person without a weapon or armor would be dead within minutes of leaving their shelter. Scientists on the planet created vials of nutrients that could be drained directly into the people’s bio suits, ending the need for physical food or water. The armor provided excessive electrical stimulation directly to the brain, reducing the necessary amount of time spent sleeping to about one hour.

Nature was furious. She shoved Tebra aside, searching the world for her bird and her tree.
She came upon a dark abandoned house on the outskirts of a desolated village.
Standing outside the house, blackened with explosions and bent with the heat, was her tree.
Inside the house she found her bird. He was thin, weak, and black with soot.

Nature’s fury was tangible blaze around her. With a quick movement she flung the starships attacking her planet out of her galaxy and began to unweave the edge of the time blanket surrounding her planet. When just the very corner was frayed, time on the plant froze. Satisfied for the time being, Nature turned on Tebra.
Tebra tried to defend herself with foolish promises, then weapons of silver and copper, but Nature was uncontrollable. In her fury, Nature shot arrows of toxic gamma rays through Tebra’s heart. Tebra’s body tumbled through the vastness of space, forever falling.
Nature turned back to her planet, a frozen image of desolation, murder, and pain. She took on the shape and form of one of the people and shrunk herself down to their size. Now she could walk freely on her planet. As she walked among the destruction, she drew detailed pictures of all she saw. She paused beside corpses ripped open by explosions to draw cross-sections of their bio armor, their metal respirators and scaly gloves.
She observed how the frozen super-entities were using their powers: here a person half sunk into invisibility cowered under the barrel of a flame cannon held by a man with the black eyes of invincibility; here a boy-child used his mind to lift boulders to protect from a knife-throwing attacker; here an armored girl floated just above a crowd of bodies as she shot a laser cannon into the panicked throng; her dark hair frozen in time as it whipped around her face in the icy breeze.

Nature continued walking.
She came upon more abandoned houses, on the outskirts of towns that had been desolated with flame missiles or infected with biogenic toxins. Inside these dark homes there cowered a great number of people – those with weak powers – or none at all – and those taken prisoner for a variety of horrific reasons. At the door of one such house stood a vicious looking boy with long hair and black eyes. Behind him in the house Nature could see the arched foot of a single girl. Nature slid silently around the wild guardian and stepped into the dark house, her eyes landing on the frozen figure of a girl against the back wall.

Her wrists tightly bound, the girl lay on her back with her arms twisted under her and her armor partially removed. Underneath her breastplate she wore a simple cotton shirt. The armor remained where it had been melded with her body on her arms, legs, and neck. Her metal respirator still covered her nose and mouth, but the tube that connected it to her chest had been broken, and purple blood oozed onto her white shirt. Her fierce eyes were blue slits as she lay in a petrified struggle against her bonds.

As Nature watched, the girl slowly began to move. Sluggishly at first, like she was moving through liquid lead, but as the girl strained her movements became faster and stronger until she had pulled herself back into the planet’s frozen time dimension. She continued to thrash around on the floor until she noticed there was someone else in the room with her. She struggled to sit up, her chest heaving from the lack of oxygen, cut off by the broken pipe. When her eyes fell on Nature she started yelling, her calls muffled by the malfunctioning respirator.
Nature and the time-controller stared at each other, the girl’s eyes flicking back and forth between Nature’s solemn face and the door. She expected her captor to come rushing in any moment, unless there was the chance that this other girl had already dispatched him.
As Nature watched, the girl’s breathing became more and more labored and she slowly lay back against the wall, dark blood from the hole in her chest spilling over the front of her shirt.
Nature moved closer and crouched next to the girl, touching her delicate finger to the pool of blood on her chest. The girl’s eye flashed with pain and hatred.
“Get away.” She said, her voice vibrating inside the respirator.
Nature simply examined the blood on her finger with an impassive stare.
“He’ll kill you. Get –” The girl stopped and rolled over on her side, coughing. Blood seeped out of the respirator and dripped onto the floor.

Nature stood up, wiping her finger on her pants as she watched the girl spit blood.
“You decide your people’s fate,” she said calmly, “Should you live? Or should you die?”
The girl struggled to sit up again, still coughing.
“Who are you?” she panted, her voice shaking as she clenched her teeth against the pain.
“Should your people live on?” Nature asked again.
The girl’s eyes grew wide. “I know you.” She panted, coughing up blood. “You’re —” Her eyes rolled back in her head and her chin slumped forward. Her chest heaved and purple blood trickled from a grate in her respirator down her pale face.

Nature left the house and the dying girl inside. She stepped around the boy guarding the door and walked out into the grey light of her frozen world.
Movement caught her eye, and she turned to see another humanoid walking up the road towards where she stood. He carried a body in his arms, its helmet removed, blood dripping from a dangling hand.

The figure stopped walking when he noticed Nature standing in the road, her slender body covered with sleek blue bio armor and her long white hair blowing in the freezing wind. He knelt and gently laid the girl he carried onto the ground. Golden blood seeped from a large slit down her arm, and she was missing a plate of bio armor from her shoulder, revealing a raw, burned patch of skin underneath.

“What’s happening?” he asked, looking past her at the frozen world surrounding them. His icy blue eyes reflected the glow of the setting sun.
“It’s the end of the world.” Nature said, holding one hand up to the skies. As she did so the boy’s eyes closed and he fell to his knees, his head bowed. He slumped sideways and collapsed onto the ground next to the girl he had been carrying.
The ground of the planet shook under Nature’s feet as she brought her hands together above her head, the motion reflected in the slow constricting of the planet’s polar and gravimetric fields.
She jumped up from the planet and took her place back among the stars as the pressure split her planet into pieces and compressed it into a tiny ball of color. Nature gently took the compacted sphere from the sky and nestled it into the dark velvet of a crystal jar. Clenching her jaw, she screwed the leaded lid onto the jar and pushed it away from herself, across the table.
It was the end of her world.