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From old the creatures discovered by Daughter looked into the night sky and saw a faint white band. They called it the Backbone of the Night. Daughter was confident that one day humans would fashioned certain instruments and they would see the mist was really innumerable stars.

Two-thirds of these stars are much more cool and dim than yellowish Daughter and Father, or even than orange Mother. They contained no stable layer within for a sentient eloah to form, yet they could host species of life similar to but more primitive than the elohim.

A distant ancestor of the Elohim diverged into three species. One adapted to the much cooler red stars and even colonized the ubiquitous warm brown stars that burn, ever so dimly, under a different principle than do the visible stars that shine much more brightly.

A second species became adapted for the brighter types of red stars. By necessity they reproduced prodigiously, since a large flare would kill them on the time scale of a few decades. A third species adapted to claim the more stable habitats of the hotter suns.

With much longer lifespans, this third species developed full sentience and, ultimately, established a community. These are the Elohim and the oldest surviving member, whom the B'nei Elohim named Yefefiah, is over 980,000 years of age.

Other suns were blue giants as much as a hundred times more massive than Daughter, far too hot to be quickened as one of the elohim. Once or twice in a century these stars died in a vast explosion that for a short span of time outshone even the entire city of stars in aggregate.

Long before Daughter encountered Earth, another world with sentient life was known to the Elohim. They were aquatic creatures who adapted to cross land when an ice age reduced their shallow world ocean to scattered lakes.

The Elohim took delight to find the universe looking at itself through other eyes, but the energies unleashed by the creatures hastened the end of the glacial period that made them tool-users. The Elohim watched them slowly revert to silent ocean-dwellers once more. On ten occasions the Elohim detected evidence coming from civilizations somewhere beyond their reach. In every case the evidence faded, sometimes after a frantic century or two, other times somewhat more slowly.