The Breaking Point
The year 909 AF marked the descent of the War of the Chosen into apocalyptic terror. The awakening of the Flotilla of Ardent—a galaxy-scale automind armada constructed by the long bygone Third Providence—transformed the conflict from a war of attrition into a struggle for species survival. As ancient autonomous warships scoured Unity sectors of life, the @Altaran high-general Ithiniya-Sul Aellomris commanded Corefleet Astral on the invasion's vanguard. victories and defeats had tempered her view of the enemy; she praised human fighting spirit and openly questioned the Chosen's wisdom, arguing that the Endless Unity possessed organizational superiority over the stagnant Providences. Such sentiments, whispered initially, reached the ears of jealous commanders who coveted her authority. They portrayed her competence as corruption, her tactical innovations as heresy against the divine order.
The Recall and the Rebellion
When the Chosen ordered Ithiniya's recall to @Azhil-Ilian, the summons carried specific instructions: arrest, trial, and execution for treason against the divine hierarchy. A spy within her inner circle revealed the trap before the summons arrived. Faced with annihilation, Ithiniya made a choice that would reshape galactic history. Before her command staff, she denounced the Chosen as false prophets mired in outdated dogma, declaring that salvation lay not in the Providence's rigid caste systems but in the pragmatic vitality of the Endless Unity. Her declaration triggered immediate civil war. Three nearby @Altaran corefleets, loyal to the Chosen, moved to destroy the "corrupted" fleet. Outnumbered and surrounded, Ithiniya's forces fought a desperate defensive action that lasted seventeen standard days. Through tactical genius and psionic prowess she outmaneuvered her assailants, scattering the loyalist fleets and securing control of thirty thousand vessels and their quasi-civilian logistical support train.
The Banished
Victory left no path home. The Providence would never accept the return of a declared apostate, and the Chosen would surely organize a larger crusade to eliminate the rebels. Ithiniya broadcast a galaxy-wide renunciation of her allegiance, declaring that she and those who followed her were henceforth the Banished—cast out from the light of @Azhil-Ilian but seeking truth beyond its confines. The exodus began immediately, a fleet of warships and colony vessels carrying millions of @Altaran civilians and military personnel across hostile space toward the only refuge available: the Endless Unity. The journey took eight years, traversing war-torn sectors where both sides viewed the rogue fleet with suspicion. Food supplies ran low; morale wavered; psionic shielding strained to protect the convoy from detection. Yet Ithiniya maintained rigid discipline, organizing the fleet into a mobile society where military service guaranteed civilian survival.
Arrival at the Endless Unity
In 917 AF, the Banished had finished their long transit of the vast metachors of Unity space, and emerged from the manifold at @Iolus, capital of the Endless Unity. Supreme Overseer @Antarof Gorseon, facing the devastating advance of the Flotilla and desperate for any advantage, welcomed the defectors with unprecedented enthusiasm. The integration was swift and absolute. Ithiniya abandoned her @Altaran trappings, adopting the Andaranized name @Khiro Velenar—a symbolic death and rebirth marking her loyalty to humanity's cause. Recognizing her naval genius and the combat experience of her followers, @Antarof Gorseon created the unprecedented rank of First Admiral of the Void Guard specifically for her, granting authority over civilian and military matters second only to his own. The Banished fleets were reorganized into the First Expeditionary Battlefleet, equipped with Unity war machines and integrated into the command structure.
The defection delivered catastrophic strategic intelligence to the Endless Unity. @Khiro Velenar possessed encyclopedic knowledge of Providence military doctrine, fleet positioning, and supply routes accumulated over two millennia of command. Her black gem contained tactical schematics of @Altaran corefleet formations and vulnerabilities in the Chosen's command hierarchy that no human spy had ever penetrated. More significantly, the Banished brought with them thousands of psions—individuals wielding the nethereal in ways the Unity's nascent psionic programs had yet to replicate. These @Altaran sorcerers introduced techniques of war meditation, battle precognition, and gestalt coordination that transformed Unity military capabilities, though their presence sparked immediate paranoia among the atheist establishment.
The reception on @Andarus was not unanimous celebration. The vast majority of Unity military commanders, including Grand Marshall @Tarvon Daamathor, viewed the Banished as a Trojan horse—a species known for psionic manipulation infiltrating the highest echelons of command. Accusations of infiltration and mind-control spread through the officer corps; assassination attempts against @Khiro Velenar became so frequent that the new Grand Admiral established her own parallel intelligence network simply to survive the hostility of her supposed allies. Civilian administrators balked at integrating alien populations into the meritocratic hierarchy, fearing that the blue-skinned defectors would seek to alter the fundamental character of human civilization.
The paramount figure, @Khiro Velenar, embodied everything the Unity's materialist officer corps despised. To them, she was no strategist but a mystic charlatan—an "admiral" who led through witchcraft rather than logistics, consulting ethereal visions instead of tactical screens, her battle plans reading like ritual incantations. Her presence mocked institutional reverence for process; she operated on intuition while the Grand Marshall insisted on supply curves. This was a foreign metaphysic colonizing the sterile rationalism of Unity warfare, an intrusion into rigid tradition that many found viscerally offensive beyond species prejudice.
Yet the Banished proved their utility through relentless sacrifice. Deployed against the Flotilla of Ardent as expendable shock troops, they absorbed casualties that would have devastated human morale, their psionic abilities disrupting the ancient automind's coordination protocols in ways conventional warfare could not. When @Khiro Velenar's @Battlefield Meditation turned the tide at the Siege of Veloroth, saving three core sectors from annihilation, some glimmers of grudging acknowledgment began to replace outright rejection from the greater Unity military-bureaucratic machine. The Banished soldiers who survived these meat-grinder engagements earned a reputation for unflinching loyalty and tactical innovation, gradually converting suspicion into a tense, transactional respect. The Unity still did not trust them, but it could no longer afford to waste their talents.
This transformed the conflict from a war of extinction into a war of conversion. The Endless Unity, previously technologically outmatched by Providence sophistication, suddenly possessed commanders who understood both sides of the conflict intimately. @Khiro Velenar's knowledge allowed Unity fleets to outmaneuver @Altaran formations, while her psions provided supernatural coordination that negated the Providence's numerical advantages. The Chosen found themselves fighting an enemy that anticipated their movements and wielded their own tactical doctrines against them—a psychological blow as devastating as any fleet action. The Exodus did not merely add ships to the Unity's inventory; it injected alien knowledge, supernatural capability, a strategic doctrine of transcending old limitations, and desperate dedication into a civilization previously defined by its secular humanism, fundamentally altering the moral and tactical calculus of the entire war.
The Legacy of Defection
The defection unleashed immediate political firestorm within the bureaucracies of the Endless Unity. The vast majority of Unity military commanders and civilian administrators viewed the Banished as potential infiltrators—an enemy species employing psionic deception to burrow into the command structure. Senior officers petitioned for their immediate internment; bureaucratic factions demanded expulsion back into the Flotilla's path. Only the absolute authority of Supreme Overseer @Antarof Gorseon shielded the defectors, as he overruled calls for their detention or execution, and instead granted @Khiro Velenar unprecedented command authority, risking his own political capital to protect assets he deemed irreplaceable. The Banished thus entered the Endless Unity as prisoners of their protector's grace, housed in segregated sectors and barred from sensitive installations regardless of their rank, their blue skin marking them as targets for xenophobic violence within the meritocracy they sought to join.
For decades, they remained suspended between gratitude and terror—dependent entirely upon @Antarof Gorseon's continued patronage while facing routine sabotage of their supply lines and open mutiny threats from human crews unwilling to serve under "alien witchcraft." Grand Marshall @Tarvon Daamathor led the institutional resistance, viewing @Khiro Velenar not as a savior but as a corrupting force whose @Tempered Psions, @Mystic of the Watchs, and Force Omega legions violated the Unity's materialist doctrine; only @Antarof Gorseon's absolute authority prevented their outright expulsion or liquidation. Though the Banished bled disproportionately against the Flotilla, their integration remained a cold transaction of utility, and when @Antarof Gorseon's later obsession with @Khiro Velenar's arcane knowledge culminated in the schismatic cataclysm, post-Unity historiography condemned the defectors as the vector of metaphysical corruption that destroyed the very state they had fought to preserve. In contemporary successor states, whether they were saviors, infiltrators, or merely desperate refugees—whether they corrupted a Supreme Overseer or simply served as convenient scapegoats for @Antarof Gorseon's own ambitions—remains ferociously contested across thousands of sectarian, political, archival interpretations, and the private beliefs of unnumbered individuals.