When dinosaurs roamed the earth, a far flung star bathed a world in nascent, invigorating light.
Upon its surface dwelled beings such as ourselves, bipedal, two ears, two eyes, proud and tall. They flourished beneath the watchful eye of a virile star, languishing its warming rays upon such a small, careful world.
These humanoids had progressed to the twentieth century, almost at the cusp of space travel, nearly within reach to embrace their mother’s warmth in the cool black of space. Yet, her age was showing, the once vibrant stars’ rays became a scathing red, her mass ballooned, and the once welcoming starlight became a bane for these once proud beings. Iron chilled her breast, and the sunlight that once stoked life in abundance now stifled her creations.
Great works and colors were stripped of their vibrancy. Cities melted, minds boiled. Their flesh plagued with cancers, boils, and all manner of degenerative disease. A once hopeful culture became one of dread and worry, every moment but a ruesome reprieve from the scathing sun and the chilling eternity of death.
Death became them. Their cities, their culture, great tombs in expectancy of the inevitable coming of death. They knew nothing but the grave and the sheer black obelisks that now towered above their homeworld, a meager attempt to hide from the fetid starlight of their corpse star.
An untold time passed before their cancer ridden bodies, the death that so halted their progress to that of a sparrow moving grains of sand from a beach, finally yielded a result.
Untold centuries and millennia praying alone at the cold altar of science resulted in an answer from that feckless lord of reality.
Crude star ships that projected their dying race and petulant flesh away from that red light.
They spit upon the face of fate and sailed for lands more welcoming for their aging, weary bodies.
They gave a sigh of relief. Millennia of laboring under the veil of death, of inevitability gave rise to a new dawn of unending wonders and joys.
They plied the blackness of space so deep, that the Ruinous One, that mote of red, disappeared from even the gaze of the most prying of eyes.
They flourished outside of its gaze. Those countless years doting over the absurdity of their condition, grinding their hands to the bone in search of the knowledge that would guide them away from the horrors of the Ruinous One.
Their minds bridled now with an unrestrained intellect, their ships now cut through the ebony of space like the sheerest of blades, their weapons striped the very essence from their foes.
And yet, even beyond the Ruinous One, their bodies aged and withered. Great tasks still took generations, and time wore down their wonders, their minds, their wants and needs.
Death still plagued them and they prayed at the altars of science until they too could plague all things as death does.
Their prayers went unanswered.
As they traversed reality, eventuality dictated that they would come across something that would scour their minds as deeply as the Ruinous One once did.
The beings they encountered had no name. They did not care to learn the name of these new beings.
Their flesh was sheer, devoid of any semblance of time having impacted their form. Their minds clear, crystalline, and focused. A race of creatures untainted by adversity, blessed with tolerance and grace, beholden only to kindness, not to the animus that so filled the ones that escaped the Ruinous One.
Upon first sight they despised them. Creatures untouched by death, enduring for stretches of time making mockery even of the youth of stars.
They beseeched them for their secrets, but in their wisdom saw the burning fire behind the requests, the unending, savage fear and hate stemming from death. They knew to not disgorge their most sacred of wisdom to such nascent creatures.
An anger eons in the making reached its zenith. A great hatred that was the well upon which all sapient beings draw their first drink. A savory beverage that endures beyond the first cause, affecting time and time again beyond the reaches even of the grave of its originator.
They sought to destroy these new comers. Surely, their years of inquiry and study had made them the undisputed masters of reality, and these beings untouched by hate would fall as surely as all others.
Their anger blinded them.
As much as their savagery was an articulated guile, as powerful as their weapons, as ravenous as their hunger for knowledge, they were beaten back and back.
All of their grand conquests from millennia past were felled, scoured, and destroyed. Each planet, each new star they had gingerly carved for themselves now lay at the feet of these usurpers.
One by one they fell, until only one acrid, monstrous world orbiting a dying star remained.
With horror they were beaten back to the gaze of the ruinous one, their ancient homeworld and its bloated, fetid husk now their prison from which they can ruminate about their hubris until those rays of starlight finally finish what was started eons ago. The beings untouched by hate resigned these spiteful, loathsome creatures to die where they started.
The futility of their journeys, their want of escape, their grand hubris and abhorrence of their condition led them back to where they started.
A grand, thinking race consigned to die under the watchful eye of their most hated thing.
Second now, having met those boorish creatures that hoard the knowledge to defeat death.

They resorted to their most comforted vestibule of solace, science, as they scoured the heavens for some way to rid themselves of the burden of the Ruinous One.
Curled about a nearby star, a being, an entity, a thing, was devouring its energy so as to sustain its ethereal mass. They contacted it for centuries, until it relented in its ignorance.
This being had a name. C'tan was its race. Its kind had scoured the universe since the dawn of time, siphoning energy from stars to sate their hunger.