No one knows how it started, but new stories began to emerge quietly in the nights ahead; hushed voices gazing at the heavens. Stories of stars emerged. Many constellations looked eerily similar to what they saw on earth. A few were distorted enough that they became dreamlike shapes from a distant past. A bulge here and a distortion there gave spark to new imaginations which gave way to collective story telling. Suddenly the sky gave up the earths constellations and instead gave birth to Teague Birds, Blimpies, AI’s, and nanobots. Spaceships flew across the cosmos with seven eyed monsters aboard. There was a space elevator that rose as Salacia rotated - a string of stars that lined up over the horizon. The name stuck even as the spacevater was near the apex of the sky.

A Wookie of all things appeared with his cross bow, giving reverence and memory to the great space stories of old. He stood beside a woman named Holly who in her stories always seemed to know the right thing to do at just the right time.

Little did they know that a thousand years from their time, the star stories they told would be an integral part of Salacian life and culture. The stories would alter a bit with the passing of time, but their purity and essence would remain. Salacian children would lie down at night, slender bodies in the lighter gravity, and know that somehow a Wookie, a creature invented during ancient earth was watching over them.

In a way, the myth of the first Salacians and their stories were more important than their facts. The mystery of some of the settlers disappearing and reappearing again with stories of time travel, and ancient alien artifacts long removed from Salacian soil only added to the mystique and wonder of it all. And these myths gave legs to a culture that would eventually thrive for ten thousand years expanding across the galaxy.

Salacia would even help restore Earth after the war between the two worlds. For hundreds of years during the first interplanetary war, Carlos’s first words on Salacia rang as empty echoes into the halls of crematoriums where the dead were burned by the millions.

But that night, the first night on Salacia, they were merely stories of imagination ignited by the belief that human life could thrive on other worlds. To them that night; nothing was impossible.

***

Also on that first night, in the faint glow of the surrounding darkness, two Blimpies silently watched the new inhabitants and then slowly, stealthily floated away, disappearing behind the trees.