New Hope: An Antares

Bald eminence.

My name is Antares. You will know me as the leader of my people, the Primevals. Someone in an eternal pursuit of immortality. A pursuit that I became a part of by wanting to stop it. In doing so, becoming the evil I took up the fight against. Well, maybe a little less evil. However, the lesser evil is still evil. Now I know that one can safely argue about the meaning of my former, fanatical aspirations. I would even say that I regret my past. If only that still meant something at this point…

Although I think that all of this is not so important. Me and my opinion. This will not be a story about me, but about my legacy. Completely created by accident and perhaps for that very reason so good. A few future heroines and heroes who were born somewhere along the way of my pursuit by accident. And whom I saved only to forget about them later. And not even remember them when they became them. And only now. Being alone, immortal, somewhere at the end of time. The last one alive and so desperate to find some semblance of good in my past…

True home.

The beginning of this story takes place on Terra, long before I was born. According to the stories, this is where we, the Primevals, come from. Back then, we were merely humans. This is where life was supposed to evolve, creating us, who would eventually exist carefree, in a highly developed, technological and magic-free form of the world. Even then, my ancestors had a semblance of immortality in the form of cryo-chambers. They allowed living beings to literally freeze in time. As well as suspended research on immortality, thanks to which the Primevals of that time lived to be five hundred years old. However, all this was to change in the face of the catastrophe that devastated Terra and forced the handful of survivors. The crew of scientists, who were meanwhile preparing for their journey and were at the spaceport, to leave their home forever. It was they who too early became the pioneers, setting off on a journey aboard the ark to the only planet known to them at that time that was dominated by life. A planet with the charming name, Urudrima. Unfortunately, I never managed to discover the cause and nature of this catastrophe. Most likely, knowledge of it died with the only ones who remembered it but wanted to forget…

Ark of Hope.

The spaceport and the ark were fortunately ready for the moment of catastrophe for a long time, but its flight was not planned until 8 years after the actual launch date. Due to the desire to get everything buttoned up. As it turned out, the crew may not have been fully trained, but they managed the task with the help of on-board operating instructions. And the ark itself was complete, although it had not yet passed all the repeated and periodic tests…

Towards a new lighthouse.

Right after start the flight and the completion of all the necessary work by the crew, they all went into cryosleep. They were reconciled with the fact that after the flight they would never return home. However, they were consumed by despair because of the opportunity to say goodbye that had been taken away from them and the complete loss of home. They were supposed to become another lighthouse of humanity and suddenly they became the only one. They woke up only when they reached their destination and had to land manually. The unprocessed trauma was to start to take its toll on them right away. They crashed upon landing, losing half of the crew. It was assumed that the reason was the technical condition of the ark. Maybe if they had sorted out everything that had happened to them during the flight? Maybe then we would have ended differently…

Urudrima.

After landing, to their horror and surprise, a black dragon, the then dragon king Torn, was to fly in for a meeting them. He was to announce that the dragons exercise supervision of the entire planet and could live there as long as they did not cause any problems. Then he was to indicate a place where they could establish their settlement. This place was a valley near the Dragon Mountains. The crew, taking advantage of the offer, established a settlement in the indicated place. It was then that the Primevals were actually born. They named themselves this because they considered their culture to be much older than that found on Urudrima. The world around them was terribly backward at the time, but it had magic. The Primevals turned out to be the most intelligent right behind the dragons. There also lived similar people, beastmen, elves, demons, etc. The Primevals decided to gradually lead the world through the ages so that in the future they could achieve the splendor of Terra, still mentioned in stories and legends at that time…

Towards a dark future.

The Ancients lost themselves in workaholism, perhaps it was their way of working through trauma. The way they also infected future generations. Over thousands of years, they rebuilt a semblance of Terra’s glory in the form of their city. Still located in a valley. Named Reterra. They flooded the rest of Urudrima with their culture and language, mading their heritage available to it in the form of books. They also raised the level of development Urudrima to a level somewhere between the Middle Ages and the modern era. However, progress was interrupted by dragons. Dragons who did not have the habit of intervening, only observing. However, they decided, taking a hint from the city of the Ancients at that time, that further technological development would only bring corruption to their world. They also mentioned that further development should follow the path of magic. This was the first intervention of the dragons. To which the Primevals had to agree. Accordingly, the dragons had nothing against the Primevals themselves continuing their path of development. Within their community. At that time, however, they lost their eternal purpose and calling. The society of the Primevals stopped working for a while and began to think deeply. The consequence of this was the emergence of the “Without Eyebrows” sect. The Primevals, as a society descended from unbelieving scientists themselves, believed only in science and progress. So they had an ideal field for cultivating their beliefs, possessing knowledge that was ahead the entire Urudrima by thousands of years and the ability to lead it through the centuries. But unfortunately, that ended…

“Without eyebrows”.

That sect, consisting of the Primevals who depilated their heads and eyebrows. It suggested and encouraged the community of Urudrima to abandon morality and return to research on immortality. Research that had already been conducted on Terra, but had been abandoned for moral reasons. And whose files someone decided to place on the ark along with the rest of Terra’s achievements. In a new world where dragons lived for up to 20,000 years, demons for 2,500 years and elves for 1,200 years. Suddenly, due to lack of work, it was probably only a matter of time before jealousy and the desire to equal or surpass other beings were born in scientists of flesh and blood…

Evil and “lesser” evil.

While the sect was growing without taking any action yet, I was born. And on the day I became an adult and a full-fledged citizen, unfortunately, the inhuman practice of pursuing immortality had already been a reality for several years. That’s when I decided to end it. So I began planning an assassination attempt, which ultimately ended in success. However, after the open killing of its leader at the time, it turned out that the only thing I could do at that time was to direct the already inflamed desire for immortality of my society, not stop it. I think that it was then that I became a bad person. I then took the lead of the Primevals and we began working on immortality. But now on my terms. Speed ​​no longer mattered, but doing it in the most moral way, unfortunately having nothing to do with morality anyway. Additionally, I banned eyebrow hair removal to cut myself off from the past of this movement. From that moment on, the entire community of the Primevals simply shaved their heads…

Dark underground of Reterra.

The sect’s laboratories were already located underground and all research was conducted in secret from the world. We only had to slightly rearrange them to suit the new style of work. In this way, being 269 years old from about 500 expected at birth. I and my people moved this boundary to about 3000 years before our actions were discovered by the dragons. The dragons, in their sense of superiority, did not punish us themselves. However, they informed the nearby kingdom about our actions, unfortunately one of the most sensitive to harm others. So they, in a sense of duty, devastated our city, killing most of our citizens. Those who fiercely resisted. Some they took into slavery, not wanting to completely eradicate our species. I and the few who survived, finding ourselves in the hidden undergrounds at the time, decided to undertake a change of plan…

New Hope.

We suspended our research on immortality because we hit a wall in it anyway. In our heads, however, a plan was born. To colonize a planet that we had discovered a long time ago and had almost forgotten about due to our busyness. A planet located in the New Hope system. All we needed was a ship capable of taking us there, incubators, and the embryos of our future society. So that after getting there, we could create a completely new, our own civilization in a reasonable time, a civilization that would work on immortality. This was supposed to speed up our research unimaginably…

Evi.

As soon as we were ready, we set off. Evi turned out to be a very beautiful place. For the first centuries, we did not focus on research but on the development of civilization. A civilization consisting of the Urudrim people. People living to be around 120 years old. We didn’t need a long-lived civilization. Only a rapidly evolving one. Dozens of cities and hundreds of villages were created. As well as laboratories scattered around the capital, waiting to be opened. Then, in the capital, New Colony, a university was established, and began to train the first, most outstanding students for research on immortality. The great advantage of this civilization was their complete normality. The first centuries passed without any big successes. Civilization has only extended its life expectancy from 120 to 300 years. But in the next century, a pair of the greatest geniuses were to change everything…

Thoughts, of an unexpected end.

I have always been most willing to normalize inhuman experiments on the path to immortality by the fact that once they are over, immortality itself, as well as the methods of combating mortality that have emerged along the way, will free future beings from suffering forever. Until it was too late. It never even crossed my mind that the consequence of this, if someone wants to die, is that they will quite possibly have to contribute to their own death. That’s when the question arose in my head. How much does someone have to start suffering to make such a difficult decision, the decision to take their own life?…

For a very long time now I have had the impression that I have become the last living being in this universe. This is probably the most emphatic proof of the pointlessness of immortality. It provides quite a lot of time for something to go wrong. Once, before I was alone. My best friend accompanied me. We spent a lot of time alone in this world. One day, however, we had a terrible argument. He went to get his favorite revolver. A real hand cannon and the apple of his eye. Shooting was, after all, his longest-cultivated hobby in life. He sat down opposite me and said: “There are two bullets in the cylinder and the other is for you.” Then he fucked his head off right in my eyes, looking straight at them. Literally right in my eyes, a moment later, I was rinsing the rest of his screwed up head out of them…

I have the impression that telling myself this. Constantly returning to the past. Is the final attempt to keep me sane, undertaken by my subconscious. To this day, I don’t really know what he meant. By taking his own life and suggesting the same to me. But lately I’ve been having this strange thought that if all this has already happened once. That means it’s possible. And if it’s possible, why wouldn’t it happen again? Maybe even in some way different, better? Maybe I am the last thing stopping the universe from doing this, its last active observer…

Maybe my dear friend already knew then that waiting any longer makes no sense. There is nothing to wait for. I don’t want to wait any longer. I write but there is no one left to read it. Maybe as soon as I dare to pull the trigger. History will tell itself again, it will do it itself, it will do it better, maybe differently. Because for the story I being written now, it is already too late. Since there is no one left. I am no longer th

Fragments from the book of the end of time.