(On the Hunt) Prologue

Pride: On the Hunt

Prologue

Alliance History, part 2: Alliance of Five Powers

The Alliance of Five Powers began with the Glis. Much of the origin of this ancient race is long since lost to time; in their own records, history seems to begin roughly 30,000 years ago, at the peak of the Glis Empire. The Glis were never conquerors, but built their empire through trade and alliances. Acting as science brokers among their allies, they were able to build a powerful warfleet that kept pirates at bay and kept their borders safe, but their battles were won through superior technology and firepower rather than tactics or training. This lack of skill in war would continue until the Fall: some 20,000 years ago, the Glis Empire collapsed under its own weight. Glis civilization had not been built to endure the collapse of central authority. The empire was thrown into confused panic, and former allies and neighbors rushed to devour the corpse.

Since the Glis had not been accustomed to wars of conquest, most of the myriad factions left after the Fall attempted cutthroat diplomacy as a first option, and were easy pickings for enemies using sheer force. Among those were thousands of Glis merchant-warlords who recognized the vulnerability of their own people; over millennia of fighting, these many militant enclaves consolidated though alliance and conquest into eight. The Eight Remnants eventually settled into an uneasy detente when it became clear they could not conquer each other—at least, not without leaving both the victor and victim vulnerable to any third faction. Pirates and external foes remained constantly testing the Glis borders, reduced to less than a quarter of the Empire's territory at its peak.

After over two thousand years of cold war stasis, the Kiliak Remnant made a bold grab for power. Rather than military, the move was symbolic: they renamed their capital to Gliris-Sha (or Gliris II), invoking the fallen near-mythical capital of the Empire. The response was immediate: the other seven Remnants united and fell upon the Kiliak for their presumption. To their own shock, they found cooperation much more satisfying than hostility and fear; after fully dismantling the Kiliak as a political entity, the remaining seven laid unified claim to Gliris II and, over the course of several more decades, slowly consolidated into a single Glis Remnant.

Unlike the former Empire, the Remnant would remain warlike. Though wholly uninterested in conquest, it was still fighting a nearly endless defensive war; in fact, the Remnant constantly refused offers of peace, seeing its struggle as integral to its unity and identity. This besieged mindset led to a sort of complacency in itself. When the Fourth Kingdom of the Drule Supremacy arrived, the Glis rejected their diplomatic overtures. They were seen as just another vulture to be driven from the Empire's carcass… until they obliterated the defenses of the border world of Sikril and claimed it for their own.

The infuriated Glis dispatched an assault fleet to Sikril, which swiftly became a brutal meat grinder for both sides, yet the battle there failed to stop the Drules from launching their next wave of conquest. It soon became apparent to Glis analysts that the unknown invaders had far greater resources than the Remnant possessed; while their ships were equal to the Drule vessels one on one, the Drules could field greater numbers faster. Compounding the issue was the fact that the technology and facilities to build the most powerful Glis warships had been long since lost in the Fall, despite efforts to rediscover their secrets. Their leadership was still debating the proper response to this realization when the Drules raided Gliris II and decapitated the Remnant's war effort. (To add insult to injury, they would much later learn this had been a coincidence. The Drules were wholly unaware that they had raided the capital.)

Much like what was recorded in the Fall, the Annihilation caused the rest of the Glis to collapse into panic and anarchy. Planets, fleets, and even individual ships took whatever action they saw fit to save whatever could be saved. Rushed evacuations occurred throughout the Remnant, while others opted for a last stand that would severely bloody the Drules. A few even surrendered, though no official Glis source will acknowledge this  A call was sent out for survivors to rally at the original Gliris, and ultimately four waves of refugees aboard hundreds of ships arrived there.

In orbit over their original homeworld—once a jewel of the galaxy, now a long-ruined pirate haven—the survivors made a pact that the Glis would never again be complacent victims. Instead, they would become the aggressors. Nearly every Glis soldier took an oath that so long as a single weapon remained in a single Glis' paws, the Drules would never again know peace. And thus launched what was originally known as the Glirian Crusade. Their first action was to bombard the surface of Gliris to glass, purging it of the pirates they had once feared and any hope of future habitation as a symbol of their new path.

The Glis fleet organized into four Grand Convoys: Alitra, Shiriki, Varesi, and Ka-glira. Each of them would develop a distinct culture, becoming akin to four new nations, united by spiteful rage. Each operated independently but stayed in close contact, attacking Drule forces wherever they found them, destroying as much as possible and fleeing before reinforcements could punish them. It was the Ka-glira Convoy which, some thirty years after the beginning of the Crusade, detected a large Drule fleet and arrived to find a new planet holding out against conquest.

Alliance History, part 1: United Alliance

The United Alliance was the government of Earth and its eventual colonies. Earthlings, or humans, are a young civilization best characterized by curiosity, imagination, and ambition. Historically fractious and warlike, their homeworld played host to hundreds of cultures before a single Earthling ever set foot on another world. It took two cataclysmic World Wars to bring humanity together in the most nominal of alliances, and even that was almost immediately undermined by a Cold War. Despite (or perhaps because of) their violent history, Earthlings aspiring to peace and enlightenment among the stars has long been a common theme in art and culture.

(Genesis) Epilogue

Pride: Genesis

Epilogue (In the Wings)

(Genesis) Chapter 16

Pride: Genesis

Chapter 16

Bearing Signs