8 billion years ago, a swarm of things moved through the endless night. They were complex tubes with simpler tubes attached, soft bits shielded by interlocking hard bits, navigating the soup of radiation, sparse specks of matter, and cosmically unstable nothingness. They congregated in a certain contracting nebula that made for good feeding. Some of them moved on, and some didn't.
6 billion years ago, the nebula was a fledgling solar system. Most of the tubes had "died" if such a tentative hodgepodge of energies and proteins could be called "life." Those that hadn't were more streamlined and had a narrower range of dietary requirements, sacrificing whimsical impracticalities and Boschean excess for something that could bear the yoke of gravity and atmosphere. They mingled in the churning world with other self-replicating genetic material delivery systems. Some of their fellow life forms where native to this planet, and some drifted in during the formation.
There was no real food chain, only a process of trial and error to see which varied organisms where inherently toxic and which were smart enough to produce their own food from external energy sources and stick with it. The central star was already engaged in a complex symbiosis with its orbiting worlds and the life that sprawled upon them, accreting sentience and divinity as the mindless masses basked in its light.
3.78 billion years ago, everything upon the planet's surface had been eating one another, parasitizing one another, laying eggs in each other, and having the tangled romantic and family matters that can only occur when a genus is really getting to grips with division of the sexes. One of the predominant species was a large green omnivorous insect. (I say insect, because that is the best way to describe it to somebody without thirty pages of writing space and a masters in xenobiology. It should go without saying that it differed from the group of creatures we call insects in many respects that, while prominent, our irrelevant to the plot, assuming I can find the plot.) These insects had a few glimmering nodes of awareness that could not be glorified with the title of "brain," but they already had begun to move in groups, and showed a pre-concious awe for the light and heat source.
This fed the godhead at the center of the solar system. The star was already sending subtle influences to shape the growth of these insects, and had independently discovered and discarded rough analogues of the philosophical outlooks of Plato, Neitzche, C. S. Lewis, Madeline Lengle, and Winnie the Pooh.
42 million years ago, the insects had undergone many changes. Their mandibles became retractable. They developed smooth fleshy coating on their endoskeleton that allowed them to survive chitin-melting radiation storms. The top two limbs had slowly fused, the pincer tips shrinking and developing into ten agile digits. Females had lost their vestigial wings and frontal antennae, and a complicated series of events had greatly decreased the sexual dimorphism. The complex fold of sensory antennae for olfactory functions and some high-spectrum senses with no human analogue had become a mass of long, fine, pliable reddish filaments growing out of the head. Additional hormonal glands and fat repositories specific to the needs of the egg-laying females had concentrated into two hemispherical masses on the torso near the arm-joints.
The nebulous tissues that space-wandering predecessors used to sense and digest favorable flows of cosmic energy had become entwined in the dispersed nerve matter, and the gift of the divine being at the heart of the star fine-tuned these and reverse engineered some of the feedback. They could fly the skies again, discharge burning orbs of green energy, and access tremendous strength from a source more complex than muscles, but these abilities were dependent on the correct mental state. Thanks to their relatively dispersed and nebulous "brain" structure, these creatures could easily divide their conciousness and hold numerous incompatable trains of thought and emotion at one time.
They had an elaborate system of worship, paying homage to the self-aware sun that gave them these boons and to a creative force/atman/godhead principle called "Hshubngrhoth". They lived in matriarchal clans, with one sexually active female and a wide variety of mating-aged males and mindless carnivorous larvae. Most males were eaten after copulation, and those that lived past maturity without proving fertile were exiled to form their own social hierarchies predicated upon menstruation jokes and shuffleboard expertise.
12 million years ago, societies had risen, fallen, and risen again under the loving glow of Kthgh, the sun god, and the implacable sway of Shub Nigguroth, mother, father, sire, intersex parent, and parthenogeniter of life in all its crawling, devouring, squirming glory. The binary nondualistic church of Kthgh and Shub Nigguroth was in ascendency, but the population enjoyed a diverse range of spiritual traditions and religious harmony. The only intolerance came from Kthgh itself, as a consequence of which, atheists were never seen without heavy layers of fireproof clothing.
The dominant culture on the planet had arrived at something approaching gender equality, thanks mostly to the efforts of the masculinism movement. Sexual violence against any of the seven major genders was rare. Women hardly ever ate their partners after mating, and it was looked down upon as an extremely backwards practice by mainstream society.
The rules and norms of romance, domestic relationships, and sexual conduct were complex enough that they would seem non-existant to an outsider. A woman could have three formal husbands, two guys on the side, and an intimate romantic relationship with another married woman, and still be considered monogamous.
Art, sport, communication, warfare, and agriculture had all developed to a degree that transcended their norms. Many of them were so specialized and elaborate as to be indistinguishable in terms of associated tools, value by society, and death toll.
It had been a long time since anyone thought digital watches were a neat idea.
3.14 years ago, one of these alien beings was taken through the starry void by malicious captors. It personally eviscerated and devoured seven of them in its escape. This creature came from a society that had discovered fireworks, time-space curvature, provable gods, and decent gothic literature before human ancestors got thumbs. It represented a being utterly foreign, with a physiology and psychology incomprehensible on anything but a superficial level. Compared to it, David Bowie and a potted advacado plant were incest-spawned identical twins. It could parallel process as much information as three steven hawkings welded together.
Because its name was to hard to pronounce, it told the humans and quasi-humans to call it "Starfire." These carbon-based entities with a cyanobacterium somewhere in their distant ancestry think that "Starfire" is a nice girl, if a bit ditzy and slow on the uptake.