The Emerald Witch

Prologue

For hundreds of years before the great migration, Earth was slowly dying, humans and wildlife alike. The biggest reason was humans and how they had abused the planet, stole most of her resources until very little was left but still wanted more. Most of the animals on the planet were extinct, meat came from factories that created bioengineered food products.

Many of the people lived in complexes that soared into the skies, hundreds of floors high. These buildings were tethered to each other with skyways at every ten levels to keep them from swaying or twisting. Depending on the city, they were shaped into pentagons or hexagon shapes, with a few that were heptagons in the more densely populated cities.

Every person had to wear self-contained breathing systems because the air was becoming toxic to breath. Another reason Old Earth was becoming more hostile to all life was that it was time for the polar shift that happens every four hundred thousand to six hundred thousand years. The magnetic shield was weakening due to the greenhouse gases produced by natural and manmade causes.

Earth's governments were looking at ways to evacuate most of its populace to other locations in the solar system. Many satellites were sent out in space to recon different locations with small, manned ships. Several scout ships found safe places on what was left of Earth's moon. The moon was split into three free floating pieces that circled Earth and played a part in the destruction of its mother planet. . During the resource wars, the moon had been cracked by drilling too deep and

Once the moon was given the go ahead, seven million earthlings became lunarians and started the terraforming projects. It wasn't near enough with ten billion inhabitants still on Earth. During that thirty years another three lotteries were created, one for Mars, one for Europa and one for Titan. The problem was that it was going to take so long to get those projects started that most people never saw them completed.

Bands of people would find out who was on the list and murder them, so they had a better chance of going. Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered over a one-year period, that each government hid the lists from the public and performed private lotteries. Within the next two hundred years, Mars went from a barren wasteland to another Earth with oceans, forests and grasslands. Three and half billion people called Mars home or the space station that floated around Mars.

Titan had about the same number of people on it as Mars, that lived in communal pods of ten thousand people each give or take. The one problem with Titan was that it took four years to get to, many died in the beginning due to the lack of aid and supplies. It had cost so much to send ships to Titan that not many supply ships were sent and then none after the settlements were finished.

Europa was officially dismissed as a possibility due to the extreme radiation bursts from Jupiter, which many scientists had already known about from past explorations, but the governments were scrambling for solutions. After several ship loads of astronauts had died from exposure, it was taken off the list, so a space station was built outside of the asteroid belt called Fortuna Base. The population is very limited due to the expense of expanding and the danger from the asteroid belt itself.

It was a surprise to the humans to find out that they weren't the only species in the universe. They had drawn attention from another space exploration species that was from another part of the Milky Way. The Zy'thians were the first official alien race to discover life on Old Earth, after they had come across one of Earth's satellites and followed it back to its home planet.

The few species that knew about the humans had kept it secret from other systems. They knew earthlings were a violent species, reacted badly to the unknown and had a pension for taking what they wanted at any cost. The "Greys" had spread rumors for thousands of years about the super-giant blackhole in the center and that no life could survive in a violent galaxy. Holothians "The Greys" were a very greedy race and didn't want to share the bounty they had found in the Milky Way or Star System 1627.

Working together with the different races of aliens, the people of Earth were finally able to have a final solution for their planet. By 3994, almost the whole population of Earth was moving through space to their new homes. Many races didn't want the humans because of their warlike behaviors, tendencies to destroy any and everything, and egotistical thinking. So mostly uninhabited planets were sought out.

Over one billion people were sent on a thousand ships to the Tucana Galaxy because of its isolation from the rest of the universe. Halla, Raganos and Edda Ran were the planets that the North European Coalition had chosen and named. They were the only inhabitable planets in that galaxy through terraforming. It took nearly three hundred and fifty years to get there from Earth and during that time the Holothians had done genetic experiments on human volunteers.

Most subjects just became a better human version; faster, stronger, more resilient to diseases but there were those that could manipulate unseen forces. First true witches were born.