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All is stillness, the calm before the storm, the moment of quiet before the squall of the newborn. A cloud of gases, aglow with tiny motes of dust and ice, hangs silent in the star-filled void, enacting a terrifying cosmic ballet of give-and-take. Here is the primordial divine, the nebula, containing nothing yet at the same time the progenitor of life.
Tugged at by the inexorable pull of time, the cloud begins to pull together, then apart, stretched and contracted into caricatures of God. Spinning about the omega point of a would-be sun, it gains strength and speed from its momentum, and gradually coalesces. The mysterious attraction and repulsion that governs together draws atoms screaming through space close together and then apart. Two collide with a *bang*, and in doing so produce heat. In steady flares that echo the wails of a newborn, the gasps of the first amphibian to set foot on land, a star is born from a swirl of dust.
It burns steady and strong, inspiring cultures beyond count to bow down to it in an unconscious yearning towards the infinite. Its abundant energy reaches out across the galaxies, sending out streamers of light that will perhaps one day caress faces that revere a different "Sun." Its touch withers and burns the flesh from bones, bakes fertile land to dust, but is also gentle enough to coax the tiniest seedlings from the earth, and to sustain them as they thrive. From this self-sustaining, quintessential source comes the vast cycle of energy, growth and decay, birth and death and renewal that encompasses a solar system and, in the broader sense, the universe itself.
All things must end, and the stars wither as everything else will. In the dying of the light, the sky turns bloody, the Sun swells in its death throes. This faint light curdles the life it once supported, as the revered God-thing curls in upon itself in its dying agony. Gathering its energy, it hibernates within its shell of vulnerability, its raw, beating heart of power still guarded jealously. At last, in a last feeble grasp towards infinity, the old glory of the star unfurls, as arms of light reach forth to gather that which it birthed towards it. In one brilliant split-second, the essence of the infinite is revealed, the veiled heart of the cosmic flower, the incomprehensible grandeur of power and energy in its purest sense. The star fulfills its role as caretaker in the most ultimate way possible: have given of itself, it now gives itself, exploding in a tremendous release of fire whose repercussions shiver across the strands of Indra's web. It is a sacrifice to whom the greatest of martyrs is the palest shadow.
Spent, the supernova has progressed beyond its selfless life. Perhaps it has progressed beyond this universe, for, as it pulls inwards after the explosion, its momentum, as occurred with the child-nebula, pulls it in upon itself. The star ceases to exist in time and space--at least in our perception of time and space. Instead it becomes a hole, a tunnel--as matter is used to create the absence of matter. Perhaps the star continues to act as a guide and inspiration to the fearless and the dreamers, for now it represents the way beyond the mundane, beyond simple earth-bound survival, to destinations undreamed-of and undreamable.
This is the cycle of Destruction at its purest.
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