The Soul Star ⭐️ The Nexus
Fra Sole
Fra Sole had designed the Earth perfectly: a hard rock with a molten core slowly evolving into a complex world of green and blue. Brown roots rose and flourished into green leaves and shot into the blue sky. Water fell from the heavens into clear aquamarine pools. He took the characteristics from every corner of the cosmos, giving to each human people something of the diversity of the Kraslika. To the Italians and the Argentinians he gave the beauty of the Vicinese. To the Mongols and the Tuareg he gave the toughness of the Yellow Sky and Copper Tarn. To the Germans and Russians he gave the genius and brutality of the Fallarians. When, for instance, the Danes sacked the monasteries of England, he invoked in their speech the vocables of the toughest Ferrixian. When the Germans decided to take over the world and exterminate the gypsies and the Jews, he delved deep into the anger of the Ferridie, who for half a million years had focussed their hatred upon anyone who refused to bow down before the god Ferraxis.
In the general design of humans, Fra Sole borrowed mostly from the Vicinese, although he lowered the density of their neurons, and denied them the ability to change their skin colour at will. This was quite a little experiment, and it turned out very much like he suspected: the people with light skin thought themselves angels and treated the people with dark skin like devils.
But it was to the animals and plants that he gave the widest dimensions of the Kraslika. He was particularly proud of the great cats, who were modelled on the sublime race of the Elkbalam. Here he was hoping to see just how far the integration of alien and earthly might go. The jaguars of the Americas were almost exact copies of the Elkbalam, and as the experiment proceeded, ripening each millennia with what he called natural direction, the blood of the Elkbalam became more and more infused with the blood of the jaguars. He wasn’t at all surprised that they became the kings of the Crimson Stalk Jungle. The jaguars in the jungles of the Americas took a different path: as they became more and more intelligent, they came to understood the unbridled catastrophe of human evolution. In the last of their great council meetings, the great cats vowed to disperse and to lose themselves forever among the foliage and swamps of the Amazon.
Fra Sole was equally proud of the way he populated China. Here, he brought all the ingenuity he could muster, integrating over 100 alien species into a rich, dense, population between the Himalayas and Taiwan. He sprinkled the foothills from Bangladesh to Yunnan Province with every type of exotic alien species, some of them even unknown to the Vicinese. He watched as the Goldenese planned their dance stage on the plateau of the Himalaya, so that one day all the Kraslika could enjoy the richness of the human soil, sown with all the beauty and diversity of the cosmos.
But his greatest achievement was the Soul Star. Very early on in the development of the Kraslika, about two million years ago, he diced rare genes into the polar regions, so that the Vicinese and Fallarians developed a deep understanding of fractology, and built structures based on that understanding. He was unnerved at times by the designs of the Fallarians, but he accepted this, since their diced genes were open-ended, and this allowed them to act without the strictures of rule or morality. Whether or not they would construct their own morality or descend into internecine chaos or external war was unclear. The Black Star they built was so dense that even Fra Sole couldn’t penetrate it. This was perhaps a case of the student outdoing the master, a situation that Fra Sole was particularly fascinated by yet which concerned the Nexus Council a great deal.
The Council was far happier with the Soul Star, constructed by a group of Seven Sages to whom Fra Sole had suggested some of the rarest fractals he possessed. The Soul Star not only gave an additional purpose to kraslikan life, but served as a reservoir and living museum for all the species and histories since their beginning of time. That Fra Sole had merely nudged them in the right direction, and that the smartest among them, Algotodo, had built an eternal paradise, impressed even the most jaded members of the Nexus Council. Fra Sole was renowned for his artwork and celebrated as the first among equals.
This praise meant little to Fra Sole, who was busy with his creations and with the close connection he shared with every living thing in his realms. Every moment his mind and heart grew in understanding, compassion, and love for these living things that made their way toward the light. Their loving and compassionate thoughts went directly into his fractaled heart. Trillions of trillions squared a trillion times were the numbers of thoughts and feelings that made their way from all over his realms to enter his sacred infinite heart. He listened to each thought and feeling, appreciating every aspect of it before he sent it back to them, magnified, enriched, on a wave of emotion that stretched the burning heart of love all the way to the edges of the cosmos. Each creation was forever connected to Fra Sole, like gold to airy thinness beat.
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Next: 🧚 The Blue Dreamers
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