Looking out over a seemingly endless horizon there appears to be a great garden. This garden is filled with vines and trees, buildings and planets, cosmic dust balls and spectral closets of phantasmal secrets. The garden is perhaps best described as a cluttered place where things grow and decay, like a rotten urban landscape, or a noisy and polluted festival of blind party goers.
For the purpose of describing a specific fruit or a single thing in this garden, I will use more organic and pleasant imagery. However, any such descriptions are terribly inadequate for the humming and pestilent growth we call existence.
So why is there existence, as opposed to non-existence?
Where did the garden come from? Why are there these trees and creatures crawling about the landscape? Where did the rocks and dirt and rain come from? There are many guesses about the garden’s existence, and why anything exists at all.
Some guess there has always been a garden, an eternal place where decay and growth blossom without end or beginning. Some guess there was a single beginning, like a great seed planted with exceptional characteristics making it beyond the bounds of logic or reason.
Regardless of its beginning or previous qualities, there seems to be nothing in the garden beyond change. Even the boundaries of this garden are growing, stretching out over great distances. Although not infinite, and perhaps not eternal, the vastness of the garden is a great terror to behold, full of distorted and monstrous variety.
We don’t know if existence is eternal, it could easily be a mortal thing, ready to fall back into the pristine silence from which it came, rolling back up the Mountain of Time to the precipice of beginnings. Regardless, there are great things born in the garden of existence. One such creature is a star. These creatures are nuclear dynamos, great turning balls of plasma. They are born in the gutters of gravity, formed by large amounts of dust.
This dust is gathered in stellar nurseries, grouped up into immense piles, until the weight of the dust pile heats up. The pressure from gravity pulls the dust closer and closer until even the atomic structures of the dust are smashed against each other.
Then comes birth. The birth is a cascade of pressure and heat, pulling all the dust into the heart of the star. Then comes ionization and the transformation into plasma. This substance is quite different than anything found on planets, comets, or asteroids. Plasma is magnetically organized matter, with very high temperatures, and behaves like a liquid in many ways. Plasma is also highly conductive. The clouds around the newly formed plasma balls are called Bok Nebulas, they are akin to flowers of a new fruit. They are cloaked in darkness, preventing any new starlight from exiting, or distant light from entering.
Soon the new star consumes the Bok Nebula around it and is thrown from the stellar nursery which birthed it. Some nurseries will throw out dozens of stars a year until the dust from the gutters are exhausted. This is much like a plant consuming the chemicals and nutrients of the soil it is planted in.
These new stars are then surrounded by echoes of the formation and turbulence, gathering planets nearby in stable gravitational distances. Then further out, they hold asteroids and comets in a structure called an Ort Cloud.
If the conditions are abundant the star will burn for billions of years. Our Sun will burn for another 5 billion years in such a way, until the chemicals within are exhausted and a new change occurs. The Sun will puff up like a balloon, stretching its boundary past many planets, engulfing them in a luminous fire. Our planet will be scoured, consumed, and its dust will be turned into plasma.
The heartbeat of the star will flutter for millions of years, diming and brightening, sparking, and gasping as it enters a new phase of its life. Near the end of this brightness, it will have a series of explosions as it sheds its massive body. The explosions will ionize and transform the inner solar system into something called a Planetary Nebula. This nebula is akin to a skeleton or fossil. If left undisturbed it will float around the stellar core like a cloud as well.
This is when the Sun is considered a White Dwarf. While larger stars might blow themselves apart in a super nova or collapse into a pit of darkness like a blackhole, becoming a White Dwarf is the start of yet another journey.
White Dwarfs can remain intact for trillions of years, longer than the current universe has existed. They continue and smolder even when other galaxies crash into each other, they will be scooped up by black holes and held together in strict gravitational order. They are like fruit on a vine, ripe and bound by the gravity which formed them.
Even in the Milky Way Galaxy there are these clusters called Globular Clusters, most notably is the Sagittarius system, rumored to contain the core of another cannibalized galaxy. This core was absorbed about 900 million years ago, and continues to this day, filled with White Dwarfs stripped of their Planetary Nebulas, and held together by a black hole.
However, depending on the exact nature of the cosmos, these white dwarfs will continue until they eventually cool and dim. Since carbon will be its eventual state, their cooling process could result in crystallization. These crystal stars will shed no light.
Then after another stretch of untold years, perhaps trillions of years later, there will be no new stars born, and even the last stars born will dim and cool, until there is only darkness. This is the suspected fate of the garden. This dark age is filled only with the shuffling of blind galaxies, misplacing the plants and trees, stumbling over the rocks, beyond the memory of light.
So, these crystal stars will float, fragile in the darkness, ripe to be shattered by the cold wind, or the burning light of new beginnings. Perhaps they will be harvested by a great creature to consume, a forbidden fruit in the sky, eaten by a strange and ancient mouth, undescribed by the feeble words of humans.
For now, the stars grow on the vine, and their fate remains a mystery, like raspberries in purgatory.
You can also listen to me reading this piece here: Stream episode Raspberries in Purgatory by Archmonoth podcast | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
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