Prodigium: Ascension

Faith. Fate. Two words so full of potency, yet fraught with nuances touching on many of humanity's hopes and fears.
Forty-five hundred years ago humankind sprang outward from the surface of Earth to reach for the stars, no longer doomed to reside on a world rapidly overheating and running out of resources.
Through the efforts of one unique woman, humanity was freed to spread out across the Milky Way, its future fundamentally set on a new course. A fresh vigour took hold as our forebearers surged out to grasp a broader destiny: to become more than what they were. Or so all believed.
Yet it seems we cannot escape what we are, bound by natures that seal us to a fate which far too often promulgates only greed and ruthlessness and the primal urge to slake the need for revenge. Have we remained substantially no different than our ancestors? We are free in ways they never were, but our greater liberty seems only a chimera. Is the human spirit to be forever chained?
Some among us were unwilling to accept that irreducible destiny. They sought for something better. The question essentially became: what would it take to bring out the best in each human being? A wider, more encompassing vision? A mass movement? How would it be led? By whom? The answer was surprising. And it came remarkably in a similar fashion to how humanity first reached for the stars.
By two prodigious teenagers.
Both from the world of Galileo, this boy and this girl could not have been more removed from each other: one born to privilege and wealth, the other to squalor and slavery. Yet each of their respective states arose from the same source. It propelled them to what they ultimately achieved, yet worked to oppose them.
For an evil has existed on Galileo for millennia, festering, hidden from the majority of its population. In the midst its malignant intent, both faith and fate worked to bring these two together in the most inauspicious of ways.
And by that means did they ascend and bring us with them.