IN THE UNBEARABLE pressures of a star, hydrogen is burned into helium, helium is burned into carbon, carbon is burned into oxygen.

Anything available as fuel is shovelled into the nuclear blast furnace to stave off gravitational implosion.  But after billions of years of striving in this way, Tiamat found herself pressed to the wall, exhausted by the effort, helpless to do anything more to balance the titanic powers in which she had found her way.

When her core had been transformed into iron, she sighed a last time as collapse became inevitable.  In a cosmological twinkling, her gravitational potential energy was transformed into a searing explosion, a single week-long flash of brilliance that would catch the attention of every watchful creature in the galaxy.  But when the brilliance was over, when Tiamat's journey was finished, the deeper meaning of her existence was just beginning to show through.

Out of the spectacular tensions in the stellar core, Tiamat had forged tungsten, copper, and vanadium.  She vanished as a star in her grand finale of beauty, but the essence of her creativity went forth in wave after wave of fluorine, astatine, and bromine.  Tossed into the night sky with the most extravagant gesture of generosity were cesium, silver, and silicon.  Tiamat had evoked magnesium, osmium, gallium, rhodium, and titanium-each a new world of power cast forth by the quintillions for the future unfolding of the universe. 

For any worlds intelligent enough to receive them were oceans of palladium, germanium, and cadmium.  None of these power elements had appeared in the primeval fireball or in the early galactic era.  These beings were new, and though they mixed inconspicuously into the great dark clouds that wafted out from Tiamat's explosion, in their essences, in their potential power, they glittered as brilliantly as the supernova incandescence.

Tiamat had forged calcium, a new presence that would one day support both mastodons and hummingbirds.  Tiamat had forged phosphorus, which would one day enable the majestic intelligence of photosynthesis to appear.  Tiamat had sculpted oxygen and sulphur, which would one day somersault with joy over the beauty of Earth.  Great destruction, unbearable violence, and out of this Tiamat invented the cosmic novelties of carbon and nitrogen, two astounding powers that would one day sparkle as life, as consciousness, as memories of beauty laced into the genetic codings.  Tiamat's story - the story of her brilliance, her creativity, her passion, her destruction - is a sacred intensification of the universe's journey.  In her story we witness a burst of glory, an amplification of the universe's beauty, and a dangerous and joyful release of power.