Fiction:Salsetthe Republic/Beneath the Sands

Life

 * Location: Excaretran surface, equatorial desert
 * Time: Approximately 1.6 billion years BCE

Beneath the sands, new life was taking shape. A pack of reptilian, lizard-like creatures had established a nest in the middle of the desert, and freshly-laid eggs were being buried in order to protect them from other scavengers. Food in the deserts of Excaretra was difficult to come by, but where life could be found, there would always be life that subsisted off of it. The various cactus-like plants that grew in the desert bore seed-laden fruit, rich in sugar and water. An entire ecosystem revolved around the fate of these plants, which provided the bare essentials for many of the various lifeforms that lived in the desert.

But to the lizards, their incredible circumstances were lost on them. Self-contemplation did not yet exist on this planet, all that was there in their minds were simple impulses. These things were usually enough to keep them alive, and that is what mattered.

Chance

 * Location: Bersaris system space, near-Excaretra orbit
 * Time: Approximately 3 billion years BCE

Beneath the sands of time, everything wears away, and a stray grain was about to make its mark on Excaretra. Through pure chance, a rift opened up from hyperspace. It only appeared for a moment before closing again, but the damage had already been done by then. The hyperspace rift spewed a miasma of high-energy EM radiation and Essence due to its unique location in hyperspace. While the radiation from just a small amount of hypermatter leaking into realspace would've been enough to have a noticeable effect on the life that existed on Excaretra, the burst of Essence turned this brief anomaly into a major extinction event. The biosphere was decimated, as almost everything that didn't resist both Essence and the intense radiation was killed by this blast of energy.

The Great Taint had made its mark on Excaretra, and it would return every several thousand years to make its mark again.

Clouds

 * Location: Excaretra, middle of ocean in the southern hemisphere
 * Time: Approximately 1.5 billion years BCE

Beneath the sands, a catastrophe was preparing to unleash itself upon the world. Heat from Excaretra's core had been building for millions of years. While the heat being released normally did not affect life much, if at all on the surface, this time the heat was building up beneath one of the shallow oceans of Excaretra. Pressure was building up beneath the relatively thin crust there, finding its way through small weaknesses in the planet's incredibly thick crust. It finally forced its way through, and its goal had been achieved. A new equilibrium had been reached. The result was an incredibly energetic eruption under the surface of the ocean.

On that day, the world was changed forever. Ash and water vapor from the eruption blocked out the light from Bersaris, and soon the remaining jungles, the last large patches of green on the surface started to wither away. The same planet that had supported such life for so long had finally taken it away.