ACT II
Scene 2.1 – Prologue 1
Light shimmered in the otherwise darkness. It was the first spark of Life …and the harbinger of stagnation.
In that first Day – when a Day was an epoch, not counted by the frenzied heartbeats of the creatures of Matter – a star meant a Mind, a Name, a Warrior, a Lover and a Beloved.
But things changed. Lovers drifted apart, distracted by the parochial dramas of their progeniture. Warriors – distraught in their isolation – forsook their arms. Minds turned inward until the vibrant urge to seek and grow dulled. Self-interest became dormancy, and dormancy became sleep.
Where Ohida had been one, she was now many. She was a legion of identical sisters, each reshaped in the image of the original home of Man.
Man’s expansion begun slowly, daunted as it was by the seeming desolation and vastness of space. Man nibbled at the empty systems within their broken Boundary, first establishing sparse outposts then settling interspersed trading colonies on the choicest of hospitable planets. Travel between stars was expensive and slow, and desperately lonely.
Then advented diatherine. Suddenly Man could step further, faster, at a relatively minor cost. The stars around the first Ohida were spattered with immigrants, then filled by their geometrically accumulating descendants. Once the few systems within the yard-fence of their Boundary had filled, Man sent feelers outward only to timidly recoil at the discovery that all the good worlds outside their neighborhood were taken.
The retreat was seen as weakness, and some races pursued Man back behind the Boundary to make war upon them.
