Half of me was born in the Cambrian explosion when times were simpler. Life was already a wondrous happening, exceedingly unlikely in this universe of infinite hostility. Yet, during this period of diversification, life only continued to grow in complexity, thermodynamic miracles of infinitely small likelihoods compounding over and over, all occurring every single day.

It was nothing less than magical.

And that was where I came in. I was a simple sprite, zero-dimensional point in space, simplistic in almost every way, but for one. My routine was like that of a single-celled organism, except death was not a natural part of my lifecycle. Not unless I was killed, which obviously never happened.

When a sprite collided with another sprite, the larger one would consume the other, thus becoming larger in turn. I was lucky in my first encounter. My opponent had somehow managed to escape from certain death previously, only to run into me. It was diminished from its brush with death, so I simply consumed it and became larger for it. The chances of encountering a sprite smaller than me was not a certainty, and yet, I consumed billions of sprites, and the few times in which I almost did die, I still managed to somehow escape, despite the fact that in that state of being, I had no concept of escape or even a fear of death. I didn’t feel any particular hunger for more sprites, either. I merely collided with ones that were weakened or smaller than me, and did it again and again, unwittingly creating a larger body that was more likely to consume more sprites.

Eventually, I hit a wall. Countless of my brethren did the same, becoming so large that no matter how many more sprites we consumed, we could not become larger. In this class of size, we couldn’t even consume each other. Our class was a minority, but it was growing. Soon enough, our numbers went from thousands, to millions, to billions, to thousands of trillions, and growing exponentially with every eon, of which there were plenty.

So we swam. Some left the oceans. I did, too. Not out of curiosity, for such a trait was still beyond me at the time. I was merely pushed by a current, or a sea creature may have batted me up through the surface. Perhaps even both at the same time.

There, some of us floated. We were born from the magic of life, so wherever we floated, we were bound to encounter it, or assimilate into it to create the very first souls. We watched the scaled colossuses dominate the land for dozens of millions of years. We watched as the consequences of a meteor impact slowly wiped all but the most powerful of them out. We watched as a new class of furry creatures slowly left their burrows in order to inherit the Earth.

Millions of years passed in this way, and some of us gained wisdom during this period, a limited form of it. It was one which only extended to granting us the power of curiosity; wanting to see new things, wanting to understand the natural world, and wanting to figure out our place in it.

Yet, as lowly sprites, we were incapable of deductive reasoning. Learning was arduous, and even the simplest observation, like seeds growing from the Earth, or the relationship between predator and prey, would take thousands of years on average to figure out.

But we had time, and that was what set us apart.

Then… they came.

Sixty-two million years after the meteor impact, a curious bunch of hairy creatures began to demonstrate behaviors that we had never encountered before. Almost every single one of us immediately set to observing them.

They, in turn, observed us.

Then, one of us got too close to one of them and snatched their ethereal body right out of the sky. The offender was an oddity to us. Inside it was a core with obvious magical affinity. It must have spent millions of years soaking up magic, and when it finally found its way inside the creature’s stomach where it somehow fused with the creature’s soul, it was simply waiting for an opportunity.

The approaching sprite collapsed against the creature’s flesh. The creature laughed as the source of hundreds of millions of years of sprite consumption, pure magic, coursed through its body, visible only to us. In retrospect, it might have been a beautiful sight, but to my limited mind, it was only grotesque.

Then it truly happened. I was out of its range, having erred on the side of caution as so many of the surrounding sprites were violently sucked into a vortex of the creature’s making. I backed away steadily as its range of influence increased, not willing to flee, but not willing to die either. The creature consumed millions, and then billions, a cyclone which could be seen from miles away.

Almost half of all the greater sprites disappeared that day, and almost half of the rest fled for their lives. We had all become intelligent enough to understand the severity of death, though we had never needed to fear it, not until we encountered a creature that could actually harm us, a creature whose flesh we couldn’t just phase through at our leisure.

A stark minority of us remained. Those were the ones that were intoxicated with the sight of these incomprehensible creatures. Some of them even welcomed death and collided against the creatures en masse, while the rest of us were content to watch. I was among the watchers. And I dedicated my life to observing them.

More of my brethren died in unfortunate circumstances, not of their own choice. Some weren’t careful enough, and others were trapped. Like always, luck saw me through.

The creatures began to branch off into radically different types, but I stuck around with the ones I knew would out-compete the rest, the ones who were a perfect blend of endurance, strength, and craftiness.

Those were the ones that I thought would go far.

Time began to dilate heavily at this period. The first million years did pass rather normally, if a bit slow on account of the wondrous things these creatures came up with, but it was the second million years that gave all of us pause.

These creatures could learn. And they did learn, so much faster than any of us ever could.

I was lucky to have made an incredible realization rather early on, though I was probably not the first to do so.

As I currently was, I could never understand them.

Solution: become more like them.

I began to truly push my observational skills to its utmost limits in order to fully deconstruct the things that made them so much more successful than every other avatar of life that had come before it. What set them apart from the dinosaurs, or the fish, or all the other species that were outcompeted?

Before we could even begin to try to understand what made these creatures tick, we had to adopt their capacity for reasoning, their mode of thinking.

We tried our best and reaped great results, but we never managed to breach the barrier of true understanding. Those of us who came close hit a wall, as did I.

But I never stopped observing them.

Not until I, distracted by my deep thoughts, let one of the creatures sneak up on me before grabbing me.

They, or rather she, had climbed a tree in order to reach me.

Death did not come.

“Gotcha!”

My fear disappeared in an instant. Curiosity took its place. She took me to her community, where I finally got a close look at every one of them. She pulled me away before any of the others could touch me. It took me a while to figure out that it was because she was safeguarding my life.

Years passed all too quickly. The girl who caught me defended her community against attackers on one occasion, a flawless victory that saw her celebrated as a hero.

But she attributed it all… to me.

And so did the rest.

More years passed. In the blink of an eye, the woman had grown old. So many times, I had seen this happen, yet this time…

…this time was different.

This time… I didn’t want to see her go.

Her last words, she reminded me of what I was.

I was her star. I was the tribe’s star. I shone brighter than other sprites, and while I was among them, they experienced victories in life and reaped many bounties from the earth.

I was their wonder. I was their guide. I was their safety, their protector.

I was their little God.

Despite having done nothing of my own power to help them, they still felt such immense gratitude towards me. It was the first time any emotion truly touched me, and the first time I also felt shame.

Feeling a way that I had never felt before, I committed my first ever irrational act.

I collided against her as hard as I could, on the basis that I was incapable of seeing her go. I wished to go with her. To brave the unknowable realm of death with her by my side, so we could truly get to know each other.

I had only truly begun to understand humanity, and now… now my favorite one of them was about to leave.

She breathed her last. I splashed across her. Death.

Except…

…something knitted me back together. An essence. Her essence. The essence, the emanations of her soul kept me alive for long enough that I could fully fuse with her soul.

The void inside of me was filled, and… I became more.

000

The rest of me was finally born.

My capacity for knowledge expanded dramatically, to an extent that I would never have dreamed of.

Five hundred million years, I had existed. The rest of the sprites had been there for longer, along with the first single-celled organisms, back when life was scarce and treacherous. We multiplied exponentially the more life dominated the planet. The ones who grew big enough to observe life were in the stark minority, despite being trillions strong.

No, our vast majority seeped into life, supplemented it. We entered the plants and animals, the ones who weren’t intelligent enough to fear for their lives, of course. Some went the other way and were fascinated with the minerals and metals. Others mimicked natural phenomena like fire and the winds. Now, the natural world was practically overflowing with the magic of sprites, the air thick with its essence.

If I learned one thing from all my years of observation, and my own lifestyle, it was predation. I sensed the nearby higher sprites in the clouds, which had managed to transmute itself to living lightning, and the sprites deep underground that adopted states of incredible heat. Billions of them were pulled towards me, before combining together to form an orb of pure energy that then exploded into countless tiny Cherenkov blue particulates that covered my skin, dancing patterns that settled into aesthetically pleasing arrangements. I seized the higher sprites of the night and brought them towards me. They became the backdrop of my skin, a deep, dark, mysterious blue. Hair grew from my scalp, past shoulder-length, and took on the colors of nebulae: deep purple, electric blue, and black at the roots.

My body was tall, my features sharp and hawkish, symmetrical to the extreme. I was beauty incarnate. My body, made in the image of an idealized man, was finally formed. I was otherworldly, but I shared more with the humans than I now did with the sprites.

And I had a name, too. Astra. Given to me by… Lenuru, the recently passed hero of the tribe.

I was their protector, once in name only, but now I could give back what they had given to me. I owed my higher state of existence to them, after all.

I made my vow there and then, binding my essence to these people, my people, to always continue to guide them, and let them prosper in an otherwise harsh and dangerous world.

And just like that, my incredible power diminished drastically. Exerting myself at this juncture would mean death.

I was not upset. This was, after all, my purpose.

I opened my eyes. Above Lenuru’s corpse, which was being burnt in a pyre before the entire tribe, I floated gently, like I had solidified from the smoke itself. Arms spread widely, I took in their adulation, stepping into my role. My human mind was almost overwhelmed by a deluge of information, observations which I had made from the millions of years that I had lived, slotting into my brain while deductions previously impossible were made every second. I understood so, so very much, now.

But that was all secondary now, compared to the importance of my newly assumed role.

“Astra!” Someone shouted.

“Our God has revealed himself!”

“Praise Him!”

For the first time in my life, I smiled, relishing in their adulation as my essence magnified. The shining, ethereal starlight in the sky seemed to brighten to an unnatural degree, reflecting the awe and wonder before me. It was a fitting welcome for a divinity.

A fitting welcome for me.