One of its natives said that extraterrestrials would call it the blue planet. An incorrect judgment: it was far too diverse. While water dominated its surface, with magnificent coral structures harboring microscopic life and gargantuan whales in slow choruses, the land had even more different structures. Towering mountains, it was said, harbored creatures out of legend. Soft ground held mysteries underfoot, the bones of ancient beings. Some ate plants, others those that ate plants. They had run and fought and thrived and been loathed, hated by a being that would have rivaled the entire spheroid in size had it been constrained to spacetime. It threatened the fragile world, but could not destroy it: it was hurled through its trajectory. On some level, it was the doing of another creature: on another, it was life's indomitable drive to win out, as always, that succeeded. The planet survived.

Its natives shared the world with beings from beyond. Inconsequential, tiny beings united to form something bigger than themselves, and survived as parts of a past whole. Pacifistic nomads tended the soil and grew a species from their dead homeworld. With no native competition, it won the tactical struggle of evolution to survive when the people that had brought it there were destroyed with uncountable natives. And the planet lived on.

Another wave of visitors came. Brilliant androids, they arrived with a singular goal: protection of their doomed creators. Alien DNA entered the biosphere permanently. Then, an artifact capable of wiping out the entire universe was hidden underneath the planet's surface. With so much potential: so many climates, so cataclysmic a history, the planet was as good a representative as any-or better-as to how interconnected the cosmos was, and how little a change could affect everything that had ever existed. The planet stayed as sentinel, but that was not enough.

Evolution patiently guided a species to fruition. A paradoxical species, certainly, capable of the barest knowledge of themselves, and with the knowledge came the key to destruction. The world burned in their footsteps: from the time of their origination they outlasted evolution's false starts. Then they moved and explored, developing themselves and mastering everything they came across. What they could not overcome, they destroyed.

But through that, a people emerged. Fractured into subgroups, identifying as their species last if at all, they nevertheless shared the same mythos. The desire, like all sentients, to understand creation. They looked to the stars, and wondered.

And wandered. The divisions led to separate cultures, each with a unique identity. Each impossible, in all the universe, to recreate. But the stories of all time resonated on that world as any. They asked who or what lived on other worlds or beyond their universe entirely. They answered, sometimes as deliberate entertainment, sometimes through serious faith. They grew apart, questing for the same goals. Through competition, they at last broke free into space. On a grand timescale, reaching their moon came instantaneously afterwards.

They grew powerful. They could destroy everything they knew, everywhere they had been, in no time at all. They sent relics into space, so that at the worst, they could leave something behind.

And while they mocked those who believed in contemporaries from other worlds, they asked themselves if such an invasion was the only thing that could unite them forever and save them from themselves-but only a few of them. Most went on with their tumultuous existence, though some more tumultuous than most. Having no opponents on a planetary scale, they fought each other on ships and with tanks and in the snow, with dangerous words that estranged each other from themselves and from opportunities they savored.

But just outside a parched, blasted, war zone, an alien landed.

He exited and looked at their destruction, not understanding it as surely as they did not understand him. To him, they were weak, incapable of resisting infinitesimally superior technology. They would fall before him if he wished, sacrifice their bodies and their freedom to further his cause.

Such ambition was not inherent to him, however. He saw their brokenness, saw their need, saw their irrationality. He saw a niche that he could fill, him and his race. The creatures did not understand how lacking their lives were, but they could with exposure to the alternatives. Their strong bodies and his people's strong minds would be bound forever then. Nothing could interfere with such symbiotism, such perfection!

They were the perfect hosts. Class Five, the technical term was. They would be overcome quickly and smoothly, with no need to know about the power struggles overhead. He would be known as the co-discover at least of the planet: he, Essam 293, the incompetent. He would show the way for his people and the people he had found. Surely, no one could interfere with his plan?

It would not matter, of course, if the hosts were aware of it. They had no capacity for resistance. All that mattered was, if there was ever any debate over how to deal with the planet, he would be trusted. Through disregarding his superior's orders and coming on this madcap mission, he had earned the right.

Somewhere on the planet, a hologram flickered. The bloody sands where Essam stood trailed and dissolved. Other sands, sands that the inhabitants viewed as vaguely similar in location if nothing more, lay in shadow, precise mathematical ratios pointing to the location of an object that was no longer there. The world was on the edge, every moment.

But it had always bounced back. From the pride in the warriors that gave their lives for what they believed in to what Essam would interpret as towering greetings from affluency, in a place where aliens were humorous concepts to be laughed at. From strife-torn cities to towering, undisturbed, trees. From a butterfly's miniscule wings to the sleek engines of Essam's spacecraft, the world was in turmoil, but a turmoil that would give rise to life that would give rise to events more unpredictable and dynamic than the imaginative species could have designed.