[Lorebook] Under the Banner of Unity (abbreviated)

A Factual and Unapologetic Overview of the Endless Unity

"The Endless Unity did not last a thousand years, but its memory shall endure for aeons to come..." - Galenorr Ronam, maintainer of the annals, 1001.5317 AF.

The Endless Unity, a political entity now universally recognized as defunct, was, for nearly a millennium, the single largest and most powerful empire in recorded galactic history. Its origins, rise, and catastrophic collapse represent a defining epoch of the current galactic age.

Founding and Meteoric Ascension

The Unity's genesis traces back approximately one thousand years to the primitive desert world of Andarus, orbiting the red star Iolus. It emerged from the unification of the planet's warring tribes under the United Tribes of Andarus, a movement galvanized by the prophet Indomir Siolon and a quasi-religious doctrine known as the Creed of Volkar. This creed was built around a divine being known as the Evenlord (or Eternal Maker), who revealed a path of totalist ideology and the pursuit of perfection. A critical, non-theological factor in its rapid ascent was the simultaneous discovery of a Precursor (First Ones) archaeological site on Andarus. This provided the nascent Unity with an unparalleled technological foundation, allowing it to bypass millennia of research and development. This combination of zealous, unified purpose and rediscovered advanced technology facilitated a period of explosive, unchecked expansion.

Ideological Evolution: From Faith to Bureaucracy

A defining oxymoron of the Endless Unity was its fundamental ideological transformation. Founded as a highly religious society, it gradually evolved into a strictly non-religious, hyper-organized state driven by the principles of Visionary-Materialist Thought. Over centuries, the divine figure of the Evenlord was systematically secularized; what was once a deity became a legendary, prophetic figurehead, and eventually, all records of his worship were purged during events like the Reformations of Aximor. Doctrinal concepts like "demons" were reclassified as "extraphysical entities," and "sorcery" was rationalized as "psionic interference." The state apparatus, particularly the Prime Council and its ancillary bodies like the All-Unity Security Committee (AUSC), became the new object of supreme devotion. The driving force was no longer faith in a god, but an unwavering belief in the state's manifest destiny to achieve perfection and dominate all creation, viewing all other civilizations as temporary entities awaiting enlightenment or extermination.

Scale and Structure

At its territorial peak in 999 AF, immediately prior to the Great Schism, the Endless Unity encompassed more than one billion colonized star-systems. Its citizenry, largely vat-grown and indoctrinated in the Core Sector before deployment, numbered in figures so vast they are analogized as exceeding the count of stars in the observable universe. This scale was managed through a surprisingly centralized, yet layered, bureaucracy. The empire was divided into sectors, each governing tens to hundreds of thousands of worlds and functioning as miniature interstellar empires in their own right, yet ultimately subordinate to the secretive Prime Council on the Silent Citadel.

Its technological might was demonstrated through feats of engineering on a stellar scale, including the construction of entire worlds as starships and megastructures whose dimensions rivaled those of stars. The Omni-Net, an instantaneous galactic communication network maintained by countless relays, served as the central nervous system of this vast empire, binding its economic, military, and administrative functions into a cohesive whole.

The War of the Chosen

The Unity's relentless expansion inevitably precipitated a confrontation with the ancient Altaran civilization, known as the Chosen, igniting the 143-year-long conflict designated as the War of the Chosen. This was less a war for territory than an existential clash of ideologies: the Unity's Visionary-Materialist progress against the Chosen's ossified psionic theocracy.

At its outset, the Endless Unity was hopelessly outmatched. Chosen technology, refined over millennia, made their warships and weapons vastly superior. The Unity’s initial strategy of attrition, leveraging its near-infinite resources and capacity for total war mobilization, proved gruellingly effective but insufficient for victory. The conflict entered a protracted stalemate, during which the Unity’s formidable industrial and scientific base began to close the technological gap. Through direct study of captured Chosen artifacts and relentless innovation, the Unity achieved technological parity by the war's first century. By its conclusion, the Unity had not merely caught up; it had far outstripped the Chosen in every measurable metric of military science, wielding a destructive and logistical capacity that rendered the final years of the conflict utterly one-sided.

This victory, however, came at the cost of the Unity's societal soul. The war fundamentally altered every aspect of Endless culture, transforming it into a permanently militarized state. The most profound and heretical change concerned the official view on psionic ability. An innate potential within all advanced life, psionics had been utterly prohibited and systematically censored throughout the Unity's history. Common knowledge of such phenomena did not exist; it was a data-void, erased from public consciousness by the Authority of Information. This prohibition was rooted in a pragmatic fear of the sheer power wielded by latent psions, the potential for social instability, and the documented tendency for such individuals to succumb to madness—a threat the state could not control.

The Chosen, a civilization built upon psionic mastery, exploited this self-imposed blindness to devastating effect. Their agents conducted terror attacks across a million worlds, and their fleets employed telepathic warfare for which the Unity had no defence. This critical weakness persisted until a seismic event altered the war's trajectory: the betrayal of Ithiniya-Aellomris, a senior Chosen general who defected to the Unity, taking the Volkaran name Khiro Velenar.

It was Velenar who identified the Unity's psionic deficit as its primary strategic vulnerability and its greatest untapped resource. Under her direction, the Unity initiated the clandestine Omega Programme. This project represented the ultimate ideological heresy: the state-sanctioned creation and weaponization of psions. The Omega Programme forcibly unlocked the latent potential in selected Unity citizens, birthing the empire's first sanctioned psionic operatives, codenamed FORCE Omega.

Seeds of a Great Schism

For the Supreme Overseer Antarof Gorseon, a man born without any psionic talent, the Omega Programme was merely the beginning. Under Velenar's tutelage, his view evolved from seeing psionics as a weapon to viewing it as a path to transcendent power. Velenar, possessing the hidden knowledge of her people, egged him on, pushing him to seek the source of all psionic power itself. She guided him beyond the crude weaponization of FORCE Omega and towards the legendary artefacts of the Evenlord—the Aulorean Auspexes. Her ultimate goal was to locate the greatest of these, the Haruspex of Falachaon, a crystalline conduit to the dead god's enduring consciousness.

In 961 AF, this quest culminated in the Octhari System. There, confronted with the last Haruspex, Gorseon performed the ultimate transgression: he touched the artefact. It shattered, its microscopic fragments merging with his very biology. The process nearly killed him, plunging him into a five-year coma during which his non-psionic mind was forcibly opened and fused with the lingering will of the Evenlord. He awoke in 965 AF irrevocably changed. No longer merely a statesman, he was now the vessel and prophet of a dead god, imbued with psionic might that dwarfed any FORCE Omega operative.

This direct communion warped his perception entirely. The bureaucratic state he led was now, in his eyes, a bloated and faithless perversion of the Evenlord's original design. The victory over the Chosen, won through the very psionic powers the old Unity had feared, was proof of its corruption.

Thus, in the moment of its absolute triumph, the Endless Unity was betrayed by its savior. The event, codenamed the Black Order, was Gorseon’s personal crusade. Leveraging his newfound, god-touched authority and the fanatical loyalty of commanders he had personally blessed, he turned his forces not outward, but inward. In a single, meticulously coordinated strike, he annihilated the Prime Council in its Silent Citadel and critically disabled the Omni-Net's core relays. This dual decapitation shattered the central leadership and the instantaneous communication network that formed the nervous system of the billion-star empire. The political and economic entity known as the Endless Unity, unable to coordinate or even comprehend its own scale without these pillars, ceased to function almost overnight, plunging into the chaotic darkness of the Great Schism.

Legacy

Today, the Endless Unity exists only in the annals of history, and the memories of those who had lived in its age. The galaxy is now fractured into the countless warring sovereign states of the Great Schism. The Omni-Net remains fragmented, its restoration impossible while the civil war rages. For the quintillions of citizens caught in this strife, the Age of the Unity is remembered as a bygone era of unparalleled glory, stability, and purpose—a time when the peoples of a billion stars stood shoulder-to-shoulder, their future seemingly endless. That this indomitable empire was not defeated by any external foe, but betrayed and broken from within at the very moment that should have been the epitome of all its triumphs, remains the most profound and tragic fact of its history.