The Impasse
For epochs uncounted, the Messian Barrier had stood as an absolute limit to stellar civilization—a boundary of exotic physics and impenetrable manifold topology that confined even the galaxy’s eldest species to the periphery. The Providence of the Chosen, whose technological supremacy dwarfed the crude innovations of younger empires, had hurled countless probes and exploratory vessels against this curtain across the ages. Each attempt ended in silence. The barrier absorbed signals, dissipated drives, and returned nothing to indicate what lay within the galactic heart. To the Chosen High Compact, the core became less a destination than a theological abstraction: a forbidden zone where the cosmic order forbade trespass. Yet beneath the veneer of acceptance, the obsession festered. The barrier’s existence implied something worth hiding, a secret so monumental that reality itself had conspired to wall it away.
The Collaboration
When spectrographic anomalies from the Inner Rim suggested the faint possibility of a transient corridor through the barrier, the Chosen found themselves faced with an unprecedented humiliation. Their archives contained no methodology for exploiting this phenomenon. It was the Endless Unity—fledgling, expansionist, and technologically inferior—who possessed the experimental stellar-cartographic techniques necessary to navigate the shifting manifold instabilities. Rather than permit the core to remain sealed, the Providence proposed a joint expedition. Historical records suggest the initiative emerged from a confluence of mutual desperation, though certain annal-keepers later noted disturbing synchronicities in how circumstances aligned to force this union. The relationship was fraught from inception: Chosen commanders viewed their human counterparts as barely sapient assistants, while Unity officers suspected their collaborators of concealing ulterior protocols. Nevertheless, the combined fleet—designated the Daltarian Expedition after the Unity’s lead astrographer—translated into the corridor in the penultimate year before the War of the Chosen.
The Penetration
The corridor itself defied conventional physics. Vessels reported temporal dilations where simultaneity became negotiable, and spatial coordinates that shifted according to observational perspective. What should have been instantaneous transit stretched across subjective months, during which communications between the Chosen and Unity elements degraded into cryptic fragments and static-laden warnings. When the fleet finally breached the terminus and entered the true galactic core, the geometry of space transformed. Star density compressed into a crowded firmament impossible to navigate by conventional means. Gravity behaved not as a constant but as a predatory force, clawing at hulls and drive systems. And everywhere, the background radiation carried undertones—frequencies that registered not in audio receptors but in the hindbrain, suggesting the presence of something vast, aware, and ravenous.
The Silence
The details of what transpired within the core remain deliberately obscured in surviving records, sealed not by mere classification but by existential hazard protocols. Fragmentary telemetry recovered from automated beacons depicts spatial shear events tearing Chosen warships apart without conventional weapon signatures. Audio logs from Unity stellar-fortresses capture the sounds of crew members screaming about "the dark between density" before transmission ceased entirely. Biological samples recovered from the expedition’s wake—stored within the @Daltarian Repository—exhibit entropy patterns that violate thermodynamic principles, suggesting exposure to forces that predate stellar nucleosynthesis. These materials radiate a subtle, persistent malevolence; prolonged exposure induces synaptic degradation and obsessive fixation upon geometric patterns resembling those encountered within the core.
The Fabricated Betrayal
Public historiography records the expedition’s conclusion as an act of Chosen treachery. Recovered footage shows Providence warships opening fire upon Unity stellar-fortresses with devastating effect, supposedly confirming millennia of suspicion regarding Chosen imperial ambitions. This narrative served neatly to justify the subsequent War of the Chosen—a convenient casus belli that unified disparate human factions against the alien menace. Yet the classified deposition of the Unity’s annal-keepers tells a more disturbing story. The Chosen vessels that "betrayed" their allies exhibited no standard tactical formations; their firing solutions were erratic, calculated to inflict maximum suffering rather than strategic advantage. Survivor accounts—those few who escaped before the corridor collapsed—described the Chosen ships as "hollow," their crews silent, their hulls growing organic protrusions that defied metallurgical categorization.
The Truth
The reality, as pieced together from quantum-encrypted logs that bypassed the jamming protocols, is that both expeditionary branches encountered an identical fate. Within the core’s hyper-dense stellar environment, they awakened— or perhaps simply attracted the attention of—a primordial entity of sufficient age to predate the formation of the galactic disk. Designated in the restricted annals as the "Umbra," this presence consumed not biomass but coherence itself, rewriting the informational substrate of vessels and crews alike into extensions of its own negation. The Chosen did not betray the Unity; they had been subsumed, converted into instruments of the entity’s expansion. The subsequent battle footage was real, but the combatants were no longer representatives of their respective civilizations—they were puppets of the core, shadow-puppets dancing to an ancient appetite’s awakening.
Legacy
The Daltarian Expedition represents more than a tragic misadventure. It marks the precise moment when the End of the Cycle became inevitable. The corridor’s creation—and the mysterious chain of events that forced two mutually hostile powers into cooperation—suggests to certain threshold analysts that the expedition’s inception may have served interests beyond mortal ambition, as though some external calculus required the barrier’s puncture at that specific juncture. The War of the Chosen that followed was but the first tremor of a larger cataclysm. Within archive vaults across the Inner Sectors, the recovered samples continue their slow corrosion of containment materials, whispering to any who listen that the Umbra was not destroyed, merely alerted. And in the deep dark beyond the Messian Barrier, where no telemetry penetrates, something stretches toward the light