The world where Ego dwelled had no real name. If it absolutely had to be called something, then Ego's Planet would do. It was a beautiful, silent little dwarf planet, about the size of Earth's moon. Its surface was covered in red soil, and when seen from space, that red looked vivid and deep, alive with the color of blood.
The lush, extravagant plant life on the surface and the intricate palaces shaped by a Celestial made the place instantly appealing. Ego claimed he had spent millions of years surviving alone in the universe. This planet had not existed at first. Little by little, using his power to reshape matter, he had built it from nothing. This was his lonely castle.
Ego's planet was both bursting with life and utterly desolate, because aside from the silent, flourishing vegetation, there was not a single animal anywhere on or inside it. As a creator, Ego was remarkably stingy with his world. He refused to let other intelligent beings enjoy the sight of it.
According to Ego, he had once longed desperately to speak with intelligent life.
But after roaming the cosmos for tens of thousands of years, when he finally had an epic encounter with another intelligent being, what he felt was overwhelming disappointment.
He had expected to meet his own kind, yet most life in the universe turned out to be tiny and short-lived, foolish and half-mad. To a Celestial, an eloquent genius was not all that different from a paramecium floating in dirty water. Before Ego could even begin to understand one of them, they were already dead of old age.
In that disappointment, Ego began reflecting on the meaning of the universe and his own existence. He realized that most intelligent beings possessed a developed brain, while he himself had been born as nothing but a brain, with no other organs at all, not even a skull to house it, as though space-time itself were his skull. That thought brought him sudden clarity. He decided that he was the thinking organ of the universe itself.
Ego imagined the universe as a giant being. The problem, in his view, was that it ought to have only one brain, one will. Otherwise it was just schizophrenia on a cosmic scale.
That was the main reason Ego wanted all other life eliminated. He wanted the universe to become pure, and he wanted himself to become pure. One universe, one will, the will of Ego the Celestial.
It had to be said, his ambition was staggering, and strangely persuasive. When he explained all of this to Peter Quill, Ego laid it out with perfect logic. For thousands of years, he had planted avatars of himself on thousands of living worlds. Once activated, those spreading Celestial cells would sweep over entire planets like a tidal wave, assimilating and devouring the souls and intelligence of every sentient being there.
The process was like setting up a giant cloud-server network. Thousands of neural nodes would form a vast web, and Ego's power would surge to an entirely new level.
But he had been very cautious. He had not launched the plan recklessly.
It was obvious why. The moment a civilization-ending scheme like this began, the one behind it would become the enemy of the entire galaxy. Ego knew he would likely get only one chance. If he could not destroy the foundations of every civilization in a short time, he would face the risk of being swarmed by furious interstellar powers. For all his claims of being a Celestial, even he would have a hard time standing against the combined fire of whole fleets.
That was exactly why he had spent so much time and effort planting thousands of avatars, covering the Milky Way and every nearby civilization that might someday threaten him. He had not even skipped Earth, that little middle-of-nowhere backwater.
Ego had made sure that once the plan began, it would hit with overwhelming force and crush the resistance of galactic civilization before it ever had time to unite.
But then a new problem arose. Activating thousands of avatars at once was not something he could do alone. At a minimum, it required two Celestials working together.
Ego knew no other Celestials, and he did not possess the knowledge to create life outright. So he resorted to the simplest method imaginable, having children.
He created humanoid avatars of himself and wandered the cosmos, charming women wherever he went. He fathered thousands upon thousands of descendants, yet could not find a single suitable vessel to inherit Celestial power. Every child who failed the test was killed and discarded in deep caverns beneath the planet.
Peter Quill was a happy accident, and to both of his fathers, Ego and Yondu, he was exactly that.
Twenty years earlier, Ego had issued a job and sent Ravagers to Earth to kidnap one person and bring him back. Yondu Udonta accepted the contract, but when he saw the target was just a half-grown kid, the rotten old pirate captain went soft. He kept Quill by his side, because he knew exactly what happened to the others delivered to Ego. When it came to children he considered worthless, Ego showed utter cold-blooded cruelty. He did not even bother pretending there was any blood relation there, he simply disposed of them.
For all these years, the only one who stayed by Ego's side was a female attendant, Mantis. In this story, she was one of his children as well. Because she had been born with empathic and hypnotic abilities, she had value to him, so he allowed her to live. He had not cared much about Quill at first, but to his surprise, this forgotten child turned out to be the very Celestial offspring he had been searching for all these years.
On Ego's planet, Peter Quill was treated like a crown prince.
He and his two former prison buddies, Gamora and Drax, were given excellent accommodations, luxurious bedchambers, fragrant fruits and vegetables, sweet rice, and cool flower-scented dew to drink. Compared to the real excess of true interstellar nobility, it was still fairly simple, but compared to the Kyln, it was paradise by several orders of magnitude.
As Star-Lord strutted into the Celestial palace, he practically wanted his nose turned into a smokestack so he could show off in front of his fellow ex-cons.
He kept waggling his eyebrows at Gamora as if to say: I'm about to inherit an entire planet, so maybe start sucking up to me now.
Gamora found his smug little act hilarious, though she was not exactly bothered by the attention.
Beside them, Drax the Destroyer stared at Peter's nostrils for a while, then suddenly burst out laughing. "I get it!"
Star-Lord, Gamora, Ego, and Mantis all turned to look at him, curious what profound insight this man could possibly have had.
"Quill, you're trying to tell the green woman that you have a really long nose hair and it's making your nose itch, right?"
"That is not what's happening!" Star-Lord said in exasperation, covering his nose. "And my nose hair is not long. I do my grooming regularly."
Drax was the classic case of brawn without brains. His dark gray skin was covered in crimson battle-markings, making him look savage and fearsome, but anyone who knew him understood perfectly well that he was basically a 260-pound idiot.
Ego could not help laughing. "Your friend is very amusing, Peter. But I'm quite certain my son has taken an interest in this young lady. Please do not reject love. It is the most beautiful feeling in the world. Whenever I see lovers embracing, I always think of Meredith, your mother, the great love of my life."
Peter's longing for his mother was deep and heavy, and sharing that love with a father felt strange to him, but it also brought a kind of relief. At last, he had found someone with whom he could speak about the pain of losing her, someone who might help his grief settle, if only a little. Maybe that was what family meant, a place where you could show your weakness without worrying about betrayal.
There was a damp warmth in the way he looked at Ego.
Ego gazed back just as deeply. "You are the finest creation Meredith and I ever made."
Drax had a question. "You said you're a brain. So when you dated women, you used an avatar?"
"That's right."
"So you built yourself a penis?"
Quill nearly lost his mind. "Man! What is wrong with you? Who asks somebody's father that kind of question right in front of them?"
Drax looked baffled. "That's private? Every winter solstice, my father used to tell me the story of how he and my mother made me."
"That is disgusting," Quill said, his face twisting in pain. Beside him, even Gamora had gone blank.
Drax shook his head solemnly. "No, it's beautiful. The fact that you Earth people think it's disgusting, that's the real problem."
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