INTO INFINITY

The Divide

Across The Gap of Syrinx, The Luneans, represented by their Five Houses, have aggressively colonised their pocket of the galaxy, referred to as The Divide by the Terranborn and The Expanse until the arrival of The Syrinx on its Penitent Odyssey in the system of Tsen Jili. (Upon recognising the Terranborn as their long-lost cousins, the Luneans included The Way into The Expanse.)

The Divide dwarfs The Way by a factor of ten, expanding at a steady rate of three times that of The Way due to vastly superior technology, though the Four Houses who claim territory expand at slightly different rates.

The Divide is largely separated into four “domains”, following the lines of expansion of its Four Territorial Houses—Sit Tsen, ArXv, Daughters of Matrioshka, and The Altered States (the Fifth House is an Herbalist analogue faction known as The Loom). Of the Four, Sit Tsen is the First Rank, and makes up the majority of both population and territorial claims, accounting for 62% of Lunean territory and 68% of its population, expanding at four times the rate of the next rank. The Second Rank is occupied by The Altered States, claiming 23% of Lunean territory but only 11% of its population. Daughters of Matrioshka are the Third Rank, claiming all but the last .2% of territory, and 0.08% of population. ArXv is the Fourth Rank, claiming only a handful of worlds as well as Star Lotus Station—the Lunean’s Centre of Arts, Culture, and Governance.

  Collectively, The Way and The Divide occupy roughly 1/4 of The Milky Way, as well as small parts of the Andromeda Galaxy and are referred to as The Quarter, The Domain, or The Expanse—depending on which side of The Divide and The Trifecta is speaking.

Terran History:

2601 CE to 136,000 AF

Apoch Freeze

The few survivors of ARMA and the Apoch-Freeze, a small population of humans from Stronghold: Gibraltat and the Coldblood Sapiens reseeded and repopulated the earth. During this time, the Alaska-Yukon Radiation Zone, home of the residual after-effects of the Hawking Incident at Denali National Labs, underwent massive changes through interactions with metastable Glitch Fields (GQF/s) left behind.

By the year 135,905 AF, Alaska-Yukon Radiation Zone--known now as the Dark Lands--is ground zero for a territory war between fledgling nuclear empires. In the year 136,000 AF, nuclear bombs are dropped over the ruins of DNL with enough energy to push the residual GQFs out of metastability.

As the DNL Metastable Field Cluster collapsed it created a persistent Glitch Field epicentered in a newly manifested sister-satellite known as Dark Sister. This event, known as the 136k-AF TDE Collapse, disabled all electronic systems, and the new stable GQF's corruption hampered any attempts to produce any form of advanced technology. 

Immediately following the 136k-AF TDE Collapse, a climatological crisis ensued, caused both by the Collapse as well as the influence of the new planet chasing Earth in its orbit from 500,000km away. Dark Sister's highly variable gravitational influence on Earth (between .24 Lunar G and 3.41 Lunar G) caused severe tidal events, leading to ecological catastrophes and the first devastating "Legion Storms". 

The rise of the Dreamborn-Mythics from humanity's collective mythos and the Relicborn Awakening occurring at the same time made a perfect storm of apocalyptic crises and plunged humanity into a dark age known as the Era of Forgetting.

1 A1 EI to Present

The Ages of Asterion

A1

At midnight, on the last day of the year 420,000 GS, the distant descendants of Homo sapien sapien switched on The First Gate--a sustained wormhole--bridging Earth and Mars for the first time in over 500,000 years, declaring the momentuous occasion a Hinge of the Ages, and the beginning of the Age of the Stars. This was to be known as the First Age of Asterion.

This Age saw humanity terraform Mars, and then the entire Solar System in the Epoch of the First Gate, the Epoch of Mars, and the Epochs of Sol.

A2

The first five Epochs--known as the Five Epochs of Struggle-- saw the humans of Terra, known today as Homo terrani, send several interstellar missions to Proxima Centauri, only for each successive mission to end in failure as their crews and passengers succumbed to a sickness known as space wasting. In E3, H. terrani made the decision to engineer a more robust population of human capable of withstanding the harsh realities of interstellar space and exoplanetary colonisation. These would become Homo asteri--men of the stars.

Homo Asteri established the first extrasolar colony on a suitable exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri, followed quickly thereafter by five additional colonies in what would become known as the Epochs of Five Colonies.

A3-A5 EII

The Great Expanse, The Age of Rivers, & The Incursion

The subsequent 216,000 years--now referred to as Tanno(a portmonteau of Terran anno)--saw H. asteri spread across hundreds of star systems, establishing various empires, including the greatest up to that point.

The River, an empire spanning 115 Planets at its peak, housed nearly 40% of the entire human population. Its Crown World--New Rio--was the centre of trade, learning, art, and culture. Taking on the title of Torchbearers and True Heirs of the Old Sapiens, The River grew in wealth and prestige until the middle of the 2nd Epoch of the Fifth Age, when everything changed.

The Incursion was the largest and bloodiest war humanity ever fought. Attracted by The River's expansive, terraformed worlds, a hostile species of xenosapients swept through the empire, conquering one undefended world after another until the Confederation of Rimworlds--recognising the threat at hand--stalled the Incursion inside the New Rio System at grave cost.

The nearly 10,000 Tanno that followed saw humanity constantly fighting a desperate stalemate against the Incursion. In an act of desperation, the Confederation of Rimworlds created and implemented the First-Class Corps of Republic Marines--later shortened to the First Marine Corps or First Marines.

This army of elite, highly augmented, cybernetic super soldiers quickly turned the tides of battle. With ten full field armies of First Marines bolstering the forces of humanity, the Incursion was chased deep into unexplored territory never to be seen again.

The devastation of The Incursion, and the deep scars it left on the cultural memory of those who survived it, set humanity back hundreds of thousands of years. Through both the initial impact and seven ages of near-stagnation, humanity in the 12th Age of Asterion has barely advanced at all.

A12

Winters' Dawn, The Trifacta, and The Maw

New factions emerging along the galactic rim are beginning to challenge the old orders, rekindle old rivalries, and push the Terranborn into a new era of enlightenment.

Winters Cloak, led by their Undying Empress Ljún Fhæ, have split The Way in three. With new technologies, innovations, and advancements both many ages beyond any other faction and riding so close to the line of Technathema, and an Empress of unwavering will, the Galactic Council, on a split vote, decided to expel Winters Cloak and condemn them as Harbingers of Incursion, causing the Council to split into what is known as the Trifacta. 

Those that voted for expulsion are known as The Veil, those that voted against are The Cloaked, and those that abstained are known as The Faithless. Bitter rivalries have been drawn down the lines of the Trifacta, with Veiled and Faithless Crusades launched against each other and The Cloaked for much of the 12th Age.

The Confederation of Rimworlds, Republic, an isolationist empire on the rim of Laughlin's Wall has maintained total and exclusive control over the Rimworlds and surrounding Jack Fields since their split from The River in the 4th Age. Holding control over The Way's richest reserves of strategic resources, The CORR can cripple any nation or faction with the power of the almighty embargo. 

The CORR's Military, the Armed Forces of the Republic (AFR), hardened by 8 ages of warfare, is a military with no equal. Better training, better equipment, the AFR's greatest strength is its unbreakable will. The AFR's solitary objective being the defense of the Rimworlds and Her Sworn Allies, it has only marched on the offensive three times in its entire history, each time following the destruction of one of its worlds and against an aggressor who refused to sue for peace. In its 800,000 years of history, the AFR has never been defeated.

The Herbalists, a faction of strange, mysterious, transhumans transformed by an incomprehensible creature known only as The Goddess, have been growing in numbers as their Sacred Forests have sprouted from a flood of World Trees sprouting across The Way. Many of the First Seeds, those whose bargain with the Goddess aboard their doomed colony ships in the 4th Age gave birth Alaþ Fasjël and the Four Branches, are called to the World Tree at Phoenix-Monikyn, the Crown Prime Cathedral of the Fifth Branch.

Beneath the boughs of their great tree, Asiyn and Lilith alongside Aisling of the Dawn Star prepare for the opening of The Maw, whose echoes grow ever louder in the Tapestry of Time.