ONE: Epilogue of Hermesh

38. Then There was One

As twilight descended on Valree, the horizon got darker. The distant flashes of the cosmic struggle became brighter, seemed more frequent.

Observing it all while immersed in a melancholic silence, Ishtar finally turned to face Shubhankor and asked, "Why would you be interested to know my story?"

"My Lady, because it is perhaps the greatest secret ever kept hidden in all of creation." Shubhankor replied in a tone that betrayed reverence and admiration.

"How can you hide a story that you don't even know?"

"I have a feeling that those who concealed it, did indeed know about you. It is the rest of us who were kept in the dark. I will tell you that story, after you have told me yours. I give you my word."

Taking a few moments to think, Ishtar smiled benevolently, before starting her story. "As the sentient beings of Hermesh are thrust into all this destruction and annihilation, at this very moment, many amongst them are forced to contemplate their possible extinction. Now imagine that feeling permeating through hundreds of generations within a single species. That was the struggle that marrs the history of the Asurs.

None of our earliest historical accounts remain to tell us exactly when the Heeruuns arrived. It is generally believed that they came after our ancestors had learned to use language, but had not yet invented writing. It goes without saying that by the time the Heeruuns left, we Asurs had understood a lot more about ourselves and the universe that we lived in, than we ever would have on our own. They also learned the mathematics of the universe.

For a long time before the arrival of the Heeruuns, Hermesh was clearly visible from the night sky of our home planet. However, it was only with their help that our ancestors predicted the great impending calamity in the future. When they first made the calculations, our civilization was still in its ancient stage and the event was thousands of years away. However, as generations passed and the two galaxies came even closer, we started to find a way to save ourselves.

As a group of our scientists started working on achieving faster than light travel, others tried to predict the exact time and point of the collision in order to estimate which parts of our galaxy might be relatively safe. Working on the information drawn from these two groups of scientists, a third group started calculating possible star systems, beyond the Calamity Zone, where we could potentially resettle.

The original rescue plans formulated were not too dissimilar from the ones that the Manwatus successfully implemented in this galaxy. Given the relative distance of the safest star systems that were situated on the other end of our galaxy and the limitations of our technology, they proposed a journey that would start hundreds of years before the collision. Our entire population would travel to the other end of our own galaxy. Our calculations showed that there, our species could potentially escape the most extreme effects of the collision.

However, there was a problem. When the collision event was only a few hundred of our years away, more accurate calculations now showed that the very centre of our galaxy will collide with the outer arm of Hermesh. As a result, most of the star systems in our galaxy that were previously marked for resettlement were now redesignated to be inside the zone of impact.

By now, Hermesh was closer to our galaxy. Many astronomers took this opportunity to study the star systems of Hermesh. Some of them proposed a radical shift of technology from faster than light travel to wormholes. They argued that closer to the time of collision the intense gravitational pull generated between the two galaxies would be ideal to create sufficiently stable wormholes. They would allow ships to pass from our galaxy to Hermesh, which, they predicted, would be left relatively unscathed, once the two galaxies finally disentangled.