We each owe our birth to the death of a star.

In their cataclysmic throes of destruction, the stardust of life is created; each of us is the result of a near-infinite chain of cause and effect at a mind-boggling array of scales, as small as the interaction of sub-atomic particles and as large as the macro-economic matrices of the stellar systems in which we reside.

There are species whose religions propose a divine plan, an end goal towards which all living things must work. There are those who theorise an infinite multiverse, where all possible decisions are made in parallel, eternally splintering into an endless fractal spacetime.

Our people believe that the universe just is.

That the choices each of us make are predestined not by some higher power, but by who we are and who we have been.

This is usually the point where our emissaries are met with worried looks and mutterings of heresy, for if we are not responsible for our actions, then who is? How do we hold the universe to account for our personal transgressions?

This is the paradox of stardust, the dogma we carry with us. We do this because of who the universe made us to be.

And one day, we will carry what we have learned back to the stars that made us.