When the Drifting Star Falls

1 - Fall (1)

Loneliness. Ardazephni knew that word. He understood it. He felt it all the time. He didn't know anyone who understood it as well as he did.

Not in his current memory anyway.

Five different planets. Five different worlds. He'd been to five different, unique, varied, yet similar, societies, with their own laws, languages, cultures. He'd learned all five worlds' languages with an ease that, if he was right, shouldn't have been possible.

Not that he'd only been to five planets. In total, he'd landed on seven hundred different celestial bodies. Seven hundred, eighty-three, to be exact. Some were the same, some were different. There were even a few repeats. He'd also crashed into moons, large asteroids, dwarf planets, et cetera.

He'd been counting.

He physically couldn't not count.

Arda knew he was different, based on both his memories and his knowledge. His memories of the five planets with life showed that no one knew the things he knew-not to the extent of his knowledge, anyway-and no one knew where he came from or why, or even what he was. The sentient life he found on other planets looked nothing like him.

His knowledge was different. His knowledge was something he did not know how he gained, or when. He just knew things. Things about a planet called Earth, in a solar system in the Milky Way galaxy, called different things by many different planets. It was already 13 billion years old when Homo sapiens arrived, following several mass extinction events. Humans thrived on it for more than three hundred thousand years, and lived in a global economy for a little less than two thousand years. They had a rich yet brief history, with proud innovations, brilliant cultures, great thinkers. In the 34th century Common Era, perhaps one of the greatest inventions was created. Perpetual motion.

And then... That was the extent of his knowledge.

He knew everything about biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, language, and more. He knew about all the discoveries, the discoverers, the mysteries. The wars, the conflicts, the peaceful times.

He knew all these things. That was why he knew that he was different, because though he knew, he couldn't remember.

He tried to breathe in instinctively, only to remember he couldn't. Of course he couldn't. Arda was in space, for goodness sake.

Arda was sick of the word, but he knew he should be dead. He wasn't. Instead, he was constantly drifting, floating with no sense of time, no sense of direction, relying only on his sight, which wasn't of any use most of the time anyway.

All he saw was black. He couldn't even talk to himself. He couldn't move himself. He couldn't do anything. There was no purchase, and even if there ever was a stray asteroid or a comet flying close by, there was no direction that he knew led anywhere. He just drifted endlessly, eternally, no sense of being, no point in existing.

Space was his closest friend. It was also his worst nightmare. He couldn't tell the difference between wake and sleep.

When he started getting closer to another star system, he wasn't sure if he felt relief, tiredness, pain, or fatigue. He wasn't sure if he felt anything at all.

An unprecedented amount of time later, when he started going past some of the planets instead of crashing straight into them, he realized he was going to crash into another planet with life again. His sixth.

He didn't feel any surprise when he started approaching a blue planet, a large, beautiful ring at a forty degree angle in relation to the sun-a yellow dwarf, or G-type main-sequence star. It was smaller than the sun of Earth. Arda could tell. Though he could feel pain, he knew his eyes would be fine even if he looked a star straight on.