It was in a universe before our universe. It was in a far away world of a far away galaxy. It was the humans’ third emergence from the soup of the ground, it was the first time they had escaped their world and the first time they explored the vastness of the cosmos.

People were different then, they didn’t know it, but they were still young, naive, innocent. A different society in an era so distant from our own that it could almost be said that it didn’t exist. In this society there was a girl, she yearned for what she considered her home, she yearned for the stars.

She hungered for exploration and she was the driving force behind the humans’ desire to expand beyond the empty expanses that separated them from the other worlds, the other peoples and societies. All societies, of course, were young too. The chain of the multiverse had begun just three eight cycles before, and evolution and adaptation still were not perfected; But among the ordinary, child beings, this girl –a fluke of perfection– emerged to guide the universe out of their small homes and into the infinite terrains that surrounded them.

Together, humanity and her built spaceships and rockets, they built stations and ports, they built dreams and hopes. There were many failures –as children learn more by failing than by theory– but after decades of attempts they made it out. They travelled the solar system and then they crossed the galaxy.

A statue of this girl was built and placed in each world they visited with her iconic spacesuit, with her helmet in her hand a pony tail on her head. I don’t know if she was ever aware of her perfection, of her superior make among the naive humans. I don’t know if she ever considered herself a princess, but the people after her did. Not a normal princess, a normal princess has a home, a castle, a land where she stayed and where she lived. No. She was an astro-princess. Her castles were the nebulae in which she moved, her home was between the myriad stars and the innumerable celestial bodies of our skies. She lived in all of them, and in none of them.

She took humanity out of its cradle, along with humanity’s many brothers and sisters and together they built the greatest empire the universe has ever known.

We are now on the universal cycle 213, and look at us, barely out into the moon. They say she’ll come back, they say she’ll be born again and guide us into the ever expanding places of our reality. I hope this is our time, I hope I get to meet her, and even if I don’t, I feel happy for the people of our distant future.

The people who will once again reach the firmament and live among the stars.