Chapter Text
"When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsu, who begot them,
And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods none had been called into being,
And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained;
Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven.
--Enuma Elish, lines 1-9
The planet Aurus should rightfully not exist. Despite its immense age, the scientists of humanity have never truly understood its origin, or even the mechanism of its survival.
Aurus is in the middle of a field of asteroids, in a belt around a star at the edge of an unremarkable nebula rather close to the center of our galaxy. Its orbit is in that critical zone in the warmth of a star: not so close as to be vulnerable to damaging radiation, yet not so far as to be too cold for life. Much of its surface was once covered in water, faintly tinged gold by a potent cocktail of elements, as was the atmosphere that once encircled it. The golden planet, simultaneously prime for life, yet utterly improbable.
It should have only been a hunk of rock, a smoothed pebble made of the rubble of the inconceivably ancient megaplanets that preceded it. It should have been pulverized into smithereens by the asteroid field that surrounded it. Yet, it was the chance collision of a peculiar asteroid with one particularly chemically active tidal pool on the planet’s surface that was all it took to trigger life.
Life began on Aurus in the way Terrans believe it did upon their own world: from simple cells on upward. Humans took many eons to become what they are today. We know this story well, as it has been encoded into our very genes, though all but a select few believe we discovered it for ourselves. (namely, Jupiter Jones, her allies, and a few scattered Exiled) So too this story has been on every planet seeded, albeit greatly accelerated by the demands of industry. Aurus was but the first to grow this way.
However, the truth of the matter is that Aurus is dying. It has been dying a long, slow, suffocating death for quite some time—millennia, in fact. The planet that should never have been is returning to the nothingness from which it came, and that progress can only be slowed, not stopped.
It was when the people of the planet realized this, several millennia ago, that they began to panic. You see, though they kept growing and growing, beyond even the boundaries of their little golden planet, they had found themselves quite alone in their own little corner of the galaxy. For as far as their space-drive could take them, they found no civilization like them: they were alone.
(It was quite soon after, and because of the Seven, that they discovered they were truly not alone. Like humanity is wont to do, they went to war: the Greys lost, and became their slaves. This pattern would repeat itself over and over, across the galaxy, as far as humanity could penetrate. This pattern would not change, for a very long time, and the trigger of that change was Jupiter Jones.)
There was no one out there they could find with better knowledge than them. The humans of Aurus knew how to control many things: elements both classical and scientific, their own minds, their very bodily chemical structure. The one thing they could not control was their own planet’s decline.
Using what they had, the Aureans gathered Seven children together, a last-ditch attempt to create the best minds to analyze all.
They had each been born to families on the planet, some important, some obscure.
Each was selected for their profound intelligence.
Each was taken from their families, their young lives, the little they had known.
Each was given a role, a gender, a new name, the best of educations, everything the planet had to offer.
Each was genetically recoded from the base up, with optimized intelligence, resourcefulness, and enough beauty to let their charisma to shine.
They were given all of the resources at Aurus’ disposal, to create a way for the planet to survive.
They were given everything except their freedom.
In time, they created wonders beyond the imagining of all: new ways to build ever denser, ever stronger, to feed more and more people on less and less resources, to support the ever-growing population. The golden waters dried up, replaced by lakes of oil and sand. The golden atmosphere fizzled away, burnt as fuel, replaced with replicated substitutes in the necessary pockets. The golden planet became ringed with steel and solder, now gray and cloaked in smoke. Many more people lived ever better lives, yet all felt the loss of their once precious golden planet to the press of population. As society grew, it stratified ever further.
The people spoke in awe of their unholy power, their incredible creativity, yet also of their cruelty: for it has been said, on every planet, that absolute power will corrupt absolutely. They were revered as geniuses, as saviors. They were called the children of the ancient creator, the power ultimate, the First Principle: Abrasax, the feared god above all, the archon of time, the arbiter of fate.
They took on the God’s name willingly, as they had become a family bound by adversity, even as great and powerful as a noble House. But, unlike the true Houses, they were not to reproduce: the gene therapy and experimental radiation had robbed them of that capacity. As they could never have children, they used what they could instead: their incredible minds. They used the very same thing that had robbed them of their parenthood, and modified the population that had used them. Into the population they seeded their own genomes, to reincarnate, to recur.
Eventually, though, each of the original Seven died in turn, as is the way of the world, for none are truly immortal. (None except the Crone died of natural causes. It has become the destiny of an Abrasax to die a violent death.)
As the generations passed on, they became many other kinds of family to one another: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers, friends, enemies, and even strangers. As time went by, the only thing that stayed the same was the roles that each of the seven took—Smith, Crone, Matron, Maiden, Warrior, Patron, and Stranger. In time, these seven broken children became beatified, nearly deities.