Far off in the stretches of the Universe, there sat a single planet. A planet that was surrounded by four suns, holding it in place in the middle of the four massive, orange stars. No part of the planet was dark, no shadows were cast, and there was nowhere safe.
The only creatures who have grown strong enough to handle the heat and dryness were known as the Stof.
They were made entirely out of rock and dust, made out of uneven and sometimes broken stone. Their bodies were jagged, unproportionate, and would fall apart whenever hit with enough force.
The sizes of the figures would vary, from the size of a few skipping stones to the sizes of hills.
Despite the world never knowing the beauty of water, they had always known it existed.
Their buildings were all built in the shapes of water drops, the base sitting on the ground before stretching up into the air with long tails that went thin enough that it became invisible.
Whenever they had their festivals or traditions, the people would take the white dust covering every inch of the planet and create water drops on their bodies, along with paintings of rivers flowing down their limbs and torsos.
They dance around the fires that spring out from collecting a large pile of sand and dust and placing it on the only mountain the world knows, Mount Vuur.
The only mountain strong enough to handle the heat and stand strong.
The Stof collect whatever dust, sand, and rock they can. The entire population works together, carrying whatever they can lift up the mountain. Every year they perform the tradition, what they call Het Brandende Wensfestival.
The pile they create will burst into flames, where the people all wish for water to come to their world, giving them the joy and honor of experiencing what every other living thing in the universe needs to survive.
Every year they burn their world, hoping for a gift in return.
Their Gods they pray to, The Heiligen, never give them what they ask for.
The Stof never wavered in their faith. Every passing day they would gather to pray at their church, which sat underground away from the heat.
No matter how often they would gather however, nothing ever changed.
As The Stof would die, their bodies would be taken to create new life. Once the stones broke apart, they would be gathered and forged into new beings, continuing on life despite the minds being erased and starting over anew.
The Stof have no social hierarchy, only a collection of people with the same goal in life. There are no genders, no races, nothing to divide them. The Stof as tall as hills will still take care of the smallest Stof only a few stones big, and vice versa.
That was however, until thousands of years into their existence.
A group of The Stof began to lose faith, even growing angry with The Heiligen and wanting to prove they didn’t exist or worse…didn’t care about them.
They left their homes, walking through the endless desert until they formed their own village and society, removing all of their names and coming up with new ones.
They named themselves The Vervloekt Vuil, removing any symbols of water from their culture and living in tents made of hardened sand and dust.
The Vervloekt Vuil and The Stof lived peacefully for hundreds of years, not bothering each other and even erasing each other from history. The Vervloekt Vuil children were raised without any knowledge of The Stof, the Stof children were never informed about their own turning against them.
That was how things were for centuries, but that didn’t last forever.
One of the suns for the planet had suddenly gone out, shrouding a quarter of the world into darkness for the first time ever. The ground was turned into a frozen wasteland, no creature going there able to survive. The Stof went to The Vervloekt Vuil, trying to form an alliance to work together and hopefully save their world.
The Vervloekt Vuil refused, which was when war broke out.
The two factions waged war, the first act of violence the species had ever known.
Whenever a soldier was killed, their parts were collected in order to form more soldiers to fight. The war seemed as if it was never going to end, but that was until another one of the suns grew cold, clouding another quarter of the world into a harsh, frozen land.
The war didn’t stop.
The third sun burned out, leaving only a fourth of the world habitable.
The two factions were practically on top of each other as they continued to fight, the two people even forgetting why they were fighting in the first place. The final soldiers were sent out where an all out battle took place, a battle so devastating that no soldier survived.
Not long after, the final sun burned out, covering the entire world in ice and snow.
The world was finally given water, but the entire species was long dead from violence to have experienced it.
Now the planet sits idle, surrounded by four dead stars while covered in broken stone and dust covered in miles of ice and snow.

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