Luhrinnia watched in horror as the monstrosity devoured the last of the Celestines and at last turned its attention towards Her, staring at Her with thousands of glowing crimson eyes that ringed around its incomprehensibly huge gaping maw; a mouth lined with teeth that were larger than She was even in Her Divine Form as She was. It was over. They had lost. That seemed impossible to Her. They were Gods, and Gods don’t lose! But here they were, She alone left in the vast expanse of empty nothingness, the screams of Her fellow immortals still ringing in the pit of Her soul as the great beast began heading Her way.
Luhrinnia, the Goddess of Life, of Nature, of Heart and Hearth, given primacy over all living things, stood Her ground and waited, Her hands and eyes crackling with green electricity for She would not go without a fight. But not the sort of fight this creature expected, for if the Goddess of Life knew anything, She knew how to survive. She slipped the necklace from Her neck, a platinum band adorned with a golden acorn that was the symbol that Her worshippers had chosen for Her, a silver tear forming in one luminous green eye as She beheld it before Her. She then gathered every scrap of divine energy She could muster and poured it into the golden trinket, and in an explosion of green, crackling power She imbued it with the very power of life itself…
And then the darkness was upon Her.
The seeds of life can subsist in the most inhospitable of places: the vacuum of space; the bottom of the vastest oceans; by ancient lava flows or in the coldest of ice; and in the acidic stomach of a planet devouring beast. The golden acorn took root here in the darkness and slowly, oh so slowly, began to grow, eventually bursting out of the back of the creature many millennia after it was planted. It grew into a magnificent tree, with golden bark and crimson leaves and fruit that carried within it the last wish of a doomed Goddess, that life would yet persevere.