In The Beginning

This lonely planet, a dead rock above a young star, lay untouched in some forgotten corner of the Milky Way since its formation a couple billion years after life evolved on Earth. Its radius was about 1.2 times Earth’s, but its lower density meant its gravity was roughly equal to ours. An ocean of liquid water covered its surface, and an early atmosphere kept temperatures hovering just above the freezing point. Plates of oceanic and continental crust were just starting to move as tectonic activity ramped up, powered by convection currents that had begun to stabilize within the mantle. 

Its only company at first was its sun, a G-type star with a mass similar to our own, but with a slightly smaller radius and luminosity due to its youth. It orbited about 0.9 AU from its host, placing it well within the habitable zone. About three times as distant was a scattered asteroid belt, containing objects up to 2% of the planet’s own mass. After a long period of heavy bombardment, the whole solar system was uneventful for about 2.8 billion years. By pure chance, one of the very largest of the distant rocky objects found itself flung into the inner solar system, where it settled into a roughly circular orbit around the planet. Thrice the mass of Earth's moon and orbiting significantly closer to its host, this satellite exerted immense tidal forces, with the open oceans seeing a range of six to eight meters.

Tides kept the planet's rotational axis stable and eroded most of its shores into a chaotic mess, splitting cliffs into jagged masses before washing the rubble into smooth, well-tumbled boulders. 200 million years later, the planet's day had lengthened to about 23 and a half hours, while its 332-day year was split into distinct seasons because of its 31-degree tilt. In all, conditions were aligning to create a world perfect for life. Even after all these years, though, none emerged. No swimming or scuttling creatures populated the sea, nor did anything attempt to drag itself onto the land. Nothing reached towards the sun or scoured the hydrothermal vents on the seabed for energy. Not even the tiniest microbes could be found within some primordial soup, for the chemicals necessary for life to evolve were simply absent. By a stroke of bad luck, very few comets had struck the planet in its early days, remaining farther away than even the distant asteroid belt. No amino acids or other complex organic molecules were delivered by their impacts, and the chemical reactions that might've spawned the first self-replicating polymers never took place. And so the planet sat, seemingly doomed to never reach its full potential, destined to spin lifeless for billions of years until its surface became scorched and it was subsumed by its dying star.