Warning for slight spoilers.

When I close my eyes, I see a different time. A time where Human kind is just starting to leave the planet that had birthed it, looking to the stars to find new land and seas to explore. And, less innocently, to strip of resources, as they had done to their Mother Earth, leaving her a barren world no longer suitable for life. Billions of people attempted to flee to the ships leaving the planet. Desperation, hope, and despair filled the air as only a select few, those with the best looks, intelligence, or skills were chosen to go on to new worlds to seed Humanity's future.

Dozens upon dozens of colony ships left the dying planet, each one holding hundreds of people. Humanity spread far and wide, seeding many planets of many different types, hoping at least one seed would take fruit. The dying prayers of those left on Mother Earth were granted, and almost all of the seeds planted gave fruit. But the cost of their success was great. Much of their culture and technology was lost, forcing them to rediscover what they had once had. Most seeds were even forced to use genetic manipulation to adapt to their new environments, and those that were forced to do that always had factions that were against the changes. Those against would lash out, and eventually the conflict would destroy what little technology the colony had, leaving only the genetically engineered new species with the right tools to survive. Those that survived lost the knowledge of Mother Earth. It took centuries before the technology to send a message back to Mother Earth was rediscovered. The fruit of the seeds sent a message back, hoping to hear from their brethren on Mother Earth.

The comms were silent. Mother Earth, and all her children that were left behind, were dead. There would be no trip home, as the exact coordinates of the Solar System were lost to time. As generation after generation passed along the story, it faded from fact to fiction, historical account to myth. Mother Earth was now just a legend, a story one would hear from their elders. Having learned from their predecessors' failures, the fruit of the seeds took only what they needed for a long time.

The group of seeds closest together aligned with each other to become the Human Core Worlds. The Core Worlds pooled their resources, technology, and scientific research for the greater good of the Human race. It became a silent rule that all inquiries into what Humanity's homeworld is were to be ignored and left unanswered. If an answer was necessary, the reply should always be, "The Mother World is not to be spoken of." The rule was ingrained into every Human child from a young age, even if they did not know the true answer to the question. Mother Earth then faded from being a well-known myth, until scant few even had heard the word 'Earth' as a name of a planet.

I wonder sometimes, if Mother Earth ever recovered from what her children had done to her. If she now looked as she had before Humanity pillaged her for every last ounce of metal and every last drop of fuel. I try to imagine what the ruins of Humanity's cities look like after all this time. Has nature reclaimed the land that was consumed by the massive cities? Or are they still there, crumbling ruins a nasty scar upon the once beautiful world? A depressing thought, that maybe the bones of my long dead ancestors are all that is left as proof that life had ever existed on the planet.

And as I fight against the Empire, I can only think of how what happened to Mother Earth can't be allowed to happen again, especially not on such a large scale as an entire galaxy. My species may not have originated from this galaxy, but I, Ezra Bridger, was not about to allow the Empire to destroy the home of many sentient species and the new home of Humanity. No sentient life should ever lose their home like Humanity did. I preferred not to show it, but I sympathized with Zeb's loss of his home planet, well up until it was proven that his species' true home was a different planet. I still sympathize with the truly horrific loss of life, though.

One thing is for sure- The Empire is going down.

Sorry for taking so long to publish a new chapter. It has been a hectic time. I know this may be a strange chapter, but it came about because I played too much Civilization: Beyond Earth.