Prologue

A billion trillion miles of space was just a tiny speck in the vastness of the early universe. More and more clouds, pregnant with life, formed and went their own way. What planets would they eventually harbor and what life would finally spring up on a few? The miracle of life springing up against all the uncertainties of space, around balls of fire and gas.

Inside, such a tiny ball of fire, in a newly formed cloud of a galaxy, deep in its womb, a star was birthed. Rocks flew in random directions around it, colliding against each other, until bigger rocks were formed.

The interplanetary rocks brought metals and minerals from distant parts of the galaxy, which were slowly brewed by the sun and the inner planetary activities of these giant round rocks. A veneer of an atmosphere slowly appeared with time on some of them.

On one planet, the third rock from its sun, life slowly appeared. The gift of life smiling upon it with the warm rays of its only sun. Starting from single-celled life forms to increasingly complex, it surged ahead, seeking more life, more and more complex variations, more and more numbers, till one form or the other habituated its entire breadth and depth.

Complex bacteria in the depths of its hottest volcanoes, life forms swimming in its great seas, birds flying at the heights of its atmosphere, and animals walking its great landmasses. The dance of life continued for eons, many species came and went in the blink of millennia and everything remained largely unchanged. Life grew more intelligent and one species eventually overpowered the rest, first wiping off its own closest related species of hominids and then overpowering the rest with its bigger minds and later technology, which gave them new powers.

This is the story of the rise and fall of this species. And the story of one man from it who was able to heal its demise and resurrect it, his story spread from his infancy to ruling his planet, and being its greatest leader. The story of the planet’s near destruction and resurrection and the role he played in its most trying times.

Introduction

The World kept spinning in its familiar orbit around the sun, and the story of men kept unfolding life after life. Their pace of learning grew slowly and then gathered further pace, like a slowly kindling fire.

They learned at first to hide from the ferocity of nature, then slowly to coax her into providing their bare necessities, moving out of her jungles, and living a more predictable and easier life in the plains. Soon they got bolder, ripping her chest for minerals and ore and oil to fuel their machines. Men having stepped out of the jungles only a few thousand years before, where they were little more than hunting rodents, now quickly spread all over her vast plains and mountains and sailed her high seas, scavenging her treasures everywhere. Their greed almost emptied the abundant treasures she had accumulated over billions of years of formation. And humans like a rapidly mutating, multiplying virus kept draining her of her wealth.

But a living entity or a group of nations or a species itself gets caught in its own web, in its own elaborate lies sooner or later. So were the humans caught. Displaying both the capabilities and the intelligence of demigods, as also a school of single-celled organisms, the humans kept stroking their fires in the finite glass room of their planet, choking many species to death. Species who had called it home for much longer than they had, species who had lived much deeper in harmony with their mother nature than they did. In a small spark of time, they ravaged the planet and triggered a mass extinction unlike any other in the history of the planet. A mass extinction caused not by a natural calamity, nor by an explosive meteor, but by a teeny tiny inhabitant, a newly formed species. And when could they stop before they attacked their own kind?

The attack came at the peak of their summers. Two warring nations emptied their nuclear stockpiles onto each other. Cities of dwellings of tens of millions smoldered in the sun, the smoke going higher and higher till it reached the highest parts of the atmosphere. This was too big a blow to the ancient earth already weakened by many incessant blows. She revolted and how. It was as if this was the final blow and she could not take it anymore. Seas parted, the earth shook violently and there was no rain. The sun was blocked out in most inhabited places and a colder ice age started than the Earth had known for a million years. There was not a human nor any other species which was not affected by these events.

However, the humans turned out to be surprisingly resilient. Even in their recent arrival on the evolutionary map, they had seldom encountered a challenge so acute. Even in their loneliest evolutionary patches where their entire number was reduced to a few thousand they never faced such adversity, such a hostile environment, such a broken planet. In the midst of this turmoil, a new clan rose, a new leader of men, who would have to fight a long cruel war with his own kind before he could make a peaceful new start for his clan, for his species. This is their story.