The Return of the Cloud

Prologue- part two

Part two: The Planet with No Name

They had no idea the asteroid was coming or even that asteroids existed. The strangeness of this planet's ever evolving and mutating life forms had thwarted the progress and development of civilisation. The planet with no name had intelligent beings who had a spoken language and who had craft skills too, but these beings had no knowledge of science other than the minimum required to survive in bizarre landscapes of the weird and the wonderful; landscapes full of dangers and the unknown, full of all manners of monsters and demons, disease, and death. There was, however, a beauty to the planet. The multitude and variety of terrains, plants, and fauna made the lands exciting and colourful, mysterious and wondrous. The planet with no name was exceptional in every way, including its death.

The asteroid, also nameless, was almost as big as the planet. It had hurtled through the darkness of space since the beginning of time and may have continued its journey for eternity if it were not for that singular, innocent waiting planet of such spectacular forms. At an impact of thirteen hundred and seventeen kilometres per hour the asteroid and the planet met. As in our universe, sound does not travel through the vacuum of space and so the spectacle of explosion and bursting brilliance of colour and debris was silent to all the universe, except for the creatures on the destroyed planet who, for a very brief moment, both heard and felt the cosmic eruption. After the collision, there remained only emptiness. What was once a planet and an asteroid had all but disintegrated to form a giant planet sized cloud of spiralling dust. Most of the debris, contained by the gravitational forces within the solar system, remained within that solar system but there was also a considerable amount which had managed to escape out to the depths of the cosmos. A vast swirling mass of the dust had twirled and spun away out into space, rocketing outwards in a seemingly endless journey through time and space. The remnants, a vast frozen mass of the organic and the inorganic, sped through the galaxy. Its gently swirling mass of indeterminate diffused colours could be seen from millions of miles away, its beauty disguising its portent.

For far more than a billion years the cloud had shot through space unabated but as large as it was, the cloud could not escape the gravitational pull of the first solar system it encountered and for the last millennium it had orbited its newly found sun, narrowly missing several planets on every orbit. However, when passing close the periphery of the cloud infiltrated and changed all living things and the planets of those living things- including Sororis. The last humans to witness the strange events of the cloud had lived in the dark prehistoric age of Earth's history and they had not been aware of the cloud, only of the things that it brought. But later, when humans had science to hand, its affect would give it the simple deserved title of 'The Cloud'.