"Oh yeah, that's a thing, kill too many of the dragons without a place to put their power, and reality starts breaking down. Or something. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but it can get messy. Whereas if I help it will just sort of conveniently not be messy."

"...you're a very convenient phenomenally powerful deity, you know?"

"I try! Also, not a deity, if I admit to being a deity of things that I write I'd be sort of... duty bound... to immediately go write fix fic for every single thing I've ever written, for complicated personal reasons. So. Yes, but also no."

"Hey, I'm not judging, I was half an atheist before you showed up."

Giggle.

"Tyria's gods are terrible, anyway, you're probably better off without them. Anyway. I think I got off topic, there."

"Maybe a little."

"Just a smidge," she agrees. "Okay, where was I? Explaining space? Right, uh. So everything is floating in an infinite sea of nothingness, and there is a lot of distance between things. More than you're imagining. So much distance that I'm not entirely convinced that anyone can actually, really wrap their head around how big it is. The Earth averages about 149 million kilometers away from the Sun. Or about eleven thousand times the diameter of the Earth, if you don't measure things in kilometers. Astrally speaking, the Earth is pretty close to the Sun. So that might start giving you an idea of the distances we're dealing with, here."

"...we do measure things using kilometres, yes."

"Oh, good, that's convenient. Do you need a minute?"

"No, thank you, a second was quite enough. Do go on."

She giggles.

"Okay. So Earth's not the center of the universe. It's actually not even the center of the solar system, that honor goes to the Sun. We're sort of in this tiny little pocket of things, drifting together in the really big sea of nothingness. Elsewhere, much further away than anything in our little tiny neighborhood, are other suns with their own solar systems. The closest star to ours is, uh..." She surreptitiously Googles Alpha Centauri's distance to the Sun. "Over forty million million kilometers. And that's about where my brain can't chew on numbers that big anymore, so. Yeah. The universe is pretty big."

"I think you probably lost me after the hundred and forty-nine million kilometres but other than that I'm following."

Aestrix giggles again. "I'm sorry, I'll tone it down a bit, I just really like talking about space. So Earth—my Earth—doesn't have magic. Any, at all, that I know of. It's terrible. So I decided that if I was going to steal Earth, I'd add magic, because." Pause. "... It's magic. Plus I needed a way to make the next part make sense. So. The magic's based around transfer of energy. Light, heat, radiation, radio waves—there's this whole spectrum. I decided to let magic users convert between the different energy types, and move them around. So, like, remove all of the light in a room, then go make a brilliant light somewhere else with the stolen light. That sort of thing."

"Sounds pretty neat. A bit less flexible than our magic, though, unless I'm missing something."

"Thanks! I think without technological assistance it's overall less flexible than your magic, but I added an unscientific energy type to the list, that being souls. ... Huh. I suppose for you that'd just sound normal. All right then, sorry for not including it earlier. So, rip off bits of souls or consume entire souls for ludicrous power, so forth. Rip off too much, and a person starts losing memories and forgetting who they are, and might experience large changes in personality. There are ways to be ethical about it, but it's not required, magically speaking. I have them as really efficient to convert from, but no one's yet managed to convert other types of energy into it."

"...huh. Interesting that souls can be—like that. I'm pretty sure ours can't."

She nods. "Yeah. I think Tyrian souls can be eaten for power, but I get the impression it's an all or nothing kind of deal. All right, now you have the basic premise, so of course here is where it all goes horribly wrong. When we're dealing with people that can transfer power, especially heat and light, what is the brightest, most obvious thing to steal from? Aside from themselves, because most people find ripping off chunks of their own soul inadvisable."

He furrows his eyebrows. "The sun?"

"Got it in one!" she says, brightly. "So for most of history, the Sun was a major source of magical power. A lot of people could get by just fine on sunlight given off from the Sun, but there's only so much sunlight occurring at a time, and some people decided they would much rather just directly rip the power from the Sun itself. This turned out to be a bad idea. And so, after thousands of years of being magically nibbled on by humans, the Sun goes out."

"Thaaaat sounds like it would be a problem."

"Basically a death sentence for humanity, yeah. Except instead of just sort of dying anticlimactically, I have humanity hatch a crazy plan. Ordinarily, there is no way they could travel to another solar system and survive the trip. Maybe with a generation ship and a lot of resources their children could get there, but then there's no guarantee that solar system would even have a place humans could live. And through a combination of magic and technology, they've figured out a way to rip out people's souls from their bodies entirely, put them into a phylactery, and then later make them a new body, that the soul is then shoved into. If all goes as planned, the person is just fine once this process is done. And a soul jar is significantly more easy to take care of than a bunch of living, breathing humans. So, they rip a bunch of people's souls off, put them in storage boxes with, uh, something-like-Asuran-golems watching over them, and shoot them all off into space to find a new place to live and rebuild humanity."

"Is this the part where everyone gets turned into an evil lich?"

"Basically. I mean, not evil," she laughs. "Well, not most of them, anyway. I have the long travel through space have effects, though. Everyone wakes up with amnesia, and some people wake up, uh. Not okay. With major changes to their personality, not necessarily for the better, and possibly with a generous helping of crazy. So what happens is a bunch of amnesiac liches of a varying spectrum of morality running around in a whole new solar system, with their hordes of something-like-Asuran-golem minions doing their bidding. And that's where your alt is, he of course thought ripping out his soul and going to a new solar system was a great idea."

"...why would he think becoming a lich is a great idea? I'm a necromancer, I'd know."

"It's not precisely like becoming a lich. It's reversible, for one, and doesn't make him evil. He could get put into a real actual body with a heartbeat and flowing blood and skin that's not rotting off, and be fine. For when he's not in a body, he's got, uh—something like lucid dreaming, because of the soul magic, except the dreams can be shared with other people. So he could experience having a form and interacting physically with them, instead of being stuck in his own head the entire time. Uh, what are the other bad parts about becoming a Tyrian lich? I don't know enough about the process."