Administrative Divisions

The Metachor: Administrative Foundation of the Endless Unity

A metachor represents the largest and most significant tier of administrative subdivision within the vast territorial expanse of the Endless Unity. The concept itself was born from necessity during the critical Reformations of Aximor, a period where the sheer scale of the growing empire had outstripped the ability of a single central government on @Andarus to effectively manage interstellar affairs. The initial division created the foundational @Central Metachor (Andaran Metachor) Metachor and the @Crux Metachor, establishing a template for decentralized, regional governance that would enable the Unity to continue its expansion without collapsing under its own bureaucratic weight.

Prior to the cataclysmic War of the Chosen, the Endless Unity was comprised of 17 such metachors, each a sprawling domain administrated from a designated regional capital world. However, the second half of the war, marked by the Unity's relentless counter-offensives and reclamation of lost territories, triggered an unprecedented phase of administrative expansion. As the Unity pushed into and around formerly @Altaran-controlled space, four new metachors were rapidly established to manage these vast, newly secured frontiers, bringing the total to 21 metachors by the empire's zenith in 999 AF.

The scale of a metachor is intentionally arbitrary, designed to encompass culturally, economically, or strategically linked regions of space rather than conform to a rigid geometric shape. In practice, each metachor typically spans tens of thousands of light-years, containing billions of star systems within its borders. Below this highest echelon of authority exists a nested, standardized hierarchy of smaller administrative divisions. The supersector, a cube of space measuring 1,000 light-years on each side, forms the next tier of management. These are further subdivided into sectors (100x100x100 light-years), and then into subsectors (10x10x10 light-years), creating a logical and scalable framework for governance that culminates at the most fundamental level: the individual star system.

This intricate administrative structure, however, would not survive the Great Schism. With the shattering of the Central Authority, the metachor system became the political fault line along which the empire fractured. Almost every single metachor fell under the nominal control of an independent successor state, such as the @Sagetton Contingency or the @Novel Industrial Directorate , with only the @Mandate of Light having majority control over more than a single metachor. Yet in all cases, this control is fragmented and contested, as these new polities rarely exert dominion over the absolute majority of their metachor's territory. Instead, hundreds of smaller sector-level, subsector-level, and system-level authorities—warlords, corporate entities, and isolated planetary governments—now vie for power, transforming the once-orderly metachors into patchworks of micro-states and contested zones within the post-Unity political landscape.