Pain, pain and death.
That's all what she knew, that's all she ever knew in all her many years of life. It has been a torture to walk that world, a curse.
The world in question was once the seat of a mighty and illustrious empire, it's name forgotten long ago, now there were only ruins and radioactive waste. The last body of water was contaminated with toxins, the last tree had burned years ago, the last city destroyed and sacked more than a century ago, the last spaceship of what once had been a grand mighty fleet was no more than a chunk of metal orbiting the planet.
As she walked through the sands, in the middle of nowhere, the woman felt the last of her energy being depleted, step by step. Weeks ago she had found a can of some kind of food that might as well be the last can of food there and in the nearest ten star systems and that simple vlcan was the only thing sustaining her. Somehow nobody had found it yet, after all those years, she thought.
Nobody, that word sparked more emotions, she didn't remember the last time she talked to someone, she didn't even remember the face of her parents.
And now, in the middle of the burning sands, she thought that maybe she was the last of her kind.
Her walk was suddenly interrupted by a rock that made her fall straight into the floor. The sands softened the fall, but she realized that there was nowhere to walk to, no reason to stood up. She had been walking for months, going from place to place looking for food or more of her kind. Nothing.
Why even bother with wasting energy standing up? She rolled over her back and looked at the sky, the blue sun of her world burning through the sky like the great star it was, the only thing she could consider pretty. At least she had found a nice spot to die.
But something was wrong.
The sky suddenly blackened, the blue star suddenly blocked by a black sphere. She stared, even if it was burning her eyes, because she felt a call.
Then there was something else, the pain, the death and the suffering of the land felt like it was converging on her. There were no words to describe it, thousands of years of warfare, plague, crisis and disasters coming together in the body of a young woman. Indescriptible pain was the only thing she felt for what seemed like hours.
And then, calm.
Her husk, with it's ragged skin and broken limbs had been abandoned. She was something new, something else. She didn't feel pain and would never feel it again. She was above pain.
The eclipse was still bothering her sight though, so she extended her hand and moved the moon away.
It wasn't picking up the moon with her hands what surprised her, it was the fact that her hand no longer suffered as she moved it.
And as the moon, shattered by the force that the hand had exercised on it, cleared the way for the blue star to shine again on her, she realized that her body, while still her own, with it's purple skin and lavander hair, was beaming with immense power.
And then, she realized that nothing of her past, mortal life mattered now, expect for one thing, a name, her name.
"Vai'khali" she said, her voice resonating through the void, in a tongue now spoken by just one being.
She turned back to face her homeworld.
That which once was the cradle of an entire civilization was little more than a brown rock with dark greenish spots where the oceans had once been. Vai'khali had almost accidentally made the sight more depressing by destroying the moon, but she only slightly shattered it and altered her orbit by a huge distance.
Vai'khali could sense a lot of her latent powers, she was the energy of pain and war and death of billions given form, and as such, she was quick to notice that among a things she could possibly do, creating life was not one of them.
She sighed, there was no hope for the rock to see a brighter future.
Or could it?
Vai'khali smelled the planet. As she thought, her past self was the last living soul of her species that inhabited it. The planet had no intelligent organic life left. That immediately eliminated the idea of using her powers to save those that suffered as she had suffered down there. And even if she had entertained the idea of worshipers as soon as she realized how powerful she now was, her world had no potential worshipers as far as she knew or could possibly knew.
With her enormous violet hand, she stroked the world's weak atmosphere, as a mother would to a child. Even if the planet was still a little larger than she was.
"Oh but don't worry, something great can still be made out of you" Vai'khali said to the world.
==============
595 still worked after all these years and still fulfilled the purpose that his master had given to him.
His shape was alien even to his masters, he was just a floating black sphere with eight long articulated limbs, each with a different tool except for the two frontal ones which reassembled arms with five fingered hands. He had four optic devices on top of him, allowing him to see in every direction at all times.
The android worked on a little observatory on a mountain. The complex ran on solar power and had survived in that gray rock for a little over than a thousand years. His job was simple, cataloguing astronomical events, and so the little computer did.
Yet something went wrong. He predicted a thirty minutes long eclipse for the day and it somehow ended in five. So either his calculations were wrong or the moon decided to accelerate for some reason. The two were impossible.
595 ran his calculations again, over and over and all said the same, thirty minute long eclipse. He stopped and wrote on his memory bank a note that read, in a language long forgotten, the following sentence: "inner calculator failing, no glitch warning, check later"
He was about to activate sleep mode when the computer at his back sent him a frightening message: "Colossal unknown object derected on orbit. Material unknown. Appears organic."
595 had not articulated a word in a long time, he broke the silence record just to say "What?" Knowing well that the computer would not answer him.
Still, not only his calculations were failing, but now the observatory warned him about a huge organic being just hanging around on orbit. The two were, for him, obviously a symptom of the years of service. But he was built to be curious about the skies above the Homeworld, so he connected his optic devices to the telescope.
He couldn't believe what he saw up there. A woman of the master's kind, the size of several continents, had apparently pushed the moon away from the sun.
The woman, except for her size, looked like what his masters would consider beautiful. She was proportionally small, the automaton calculated that at scale she would be the size of a young woman just some years into adulthood, thin and elegant like a maiden and her skin was of a healthy light purple. Her hair of lavender color floated around her almost like tentacles but he guessed that it was long enough to reach her waist. She weared some kind of tunic, covering all of her body except of her hands and feet, which were bare. Her face didn't have any remarcable features, but her eyes glowed with a bright white light.
The android couldn't quite understand what was happening. But soon he realized that it didn't matter.
The woman's hand moved towards the planet, it stopped at the atmosphere, above some far region. 595 reasonably supposed that it was a chaos down there.
The woman said something in the ancient language of the Homeworld. And then the disaster stated.
Her hand came rushing from wherever it had once being, fracturing the surface of the planet and it advanced like a giant wave of destruction.
It happened so fast, 595 didn't have enough time to realize that he had been completely destroyed, as was the observatory and the mountain. And soon, the planet.
===========
Vai'khali was unable to redeem the planet that made her suffer all her mortal life. Whatever force that had turned her into a goddess had enough sense of humor to prevent her from creating or restoring life. And the new goddess didn't want a reminder of her torture left floating in space.
She started by tearing the surface asunder. Her long nails were as claws ripping prey open. Mountains, islands, everything on the surface was soon scattered and turned into rubble. While the world was still larger than her, the physics strength of the goddess was enough to expose the core after digging for a minute or so.
Then, she canalized her energies into her arm, enjoying the feeling that the flow of power induced into her body. A beam of violet rays came from her fingertips and pierced the core. In mere seconds, every volcano in tbe world erupted. In ten seconds, the heat of the surface was already at deadly levels, and then the planet exploded.
But the goddess wasn't finished yet. She conducted the remains of the planet and gave them form. Like a painter, her arms moved with harmony as she relocated the remains, infused the weak parts with her energy, making them strong, redirecting magna, fusing metals until the what remained of the planet was nothing like what it once was.
After she was done, the goddess gave her first work a good proud look.
"Well... It's a start" she said to herself.
Her homeworld had been undone and done again. It's new shape looked raw and unpolished, with sharp edges and a metallic aesthetic. Nevertheless, it had a new meaning. No longer a memory from her suffering, but now a seat from where all the galaxy could be ruled.
Literally.
Vai'khali sat on her throne and took a deep breath, the aroma of life could be sensed in all directions. Worlds big and small, planetary empires and people still in the stone age, worshippers and sacrifices and toys, a universe of possibilities. All for her and her alone.
"Alone..." She said, with melancholy "I'll need to get around that soon"
She was quick to notice that even with all her new power, there was something she lacked, something she lacked during her whole mortal life and her first hours of immortal one.
Company.