Origins and the Mother of Souls
The @Altarans are among the galaxy’s few remaining elder civilizations, their lineage stretching back over one hundred million years to the last cosmic cycle. Alongside the Saron, the @Kthon, and arguably the Echarian, they alone possess unbroken continuity from an age so distant that even biologically immortal minds cannot fully recall it. Such antiquity should confer wisdom. It conferred something else.
The @Altarans and Saron were once a single people, survivors of the Aulorean Ascendancy’s collapse. The division came when a faction turned to worship of an ancient being—a @Lord of Aulor, the deity who had performed the Great Silencing. She became known as the Mother of Souls. Her followers became the @Altaran s; those who did not remained Saron, scattering to the galactic fringes.
The Mother of Souls chose seven mortals to guide her people, then withdrew into silence—a silence that has never broken. Her faith became the organizing principle of an entire civilization. Every institution, law, and hierarchy derived legitimacy from her supposed will, yet she offered no further word. The @Altaran theocracy was built around an absent savior, her silence explained as a test of faith, with all alternative interpretations suppressed.
The Chosen
The name “Chosen” carries two meanings. First lies in that the @Altarans were chosen by the Mother of Souls herself, selected to carry her legacy and serve as the galaxy’s appointed guardians—a sacred mandate to protect and guide all younger, lesser races. Second, it refers to those who serve the Archons and, through them, the deity.
In the early Providences, this mandate was genuine. The First Providence saw itself as a benevolent protector, elevating primitive species and sharing knowledge. Over time, as the Providences decayed, the duty of guardianship curdled into a doctrine of entitlement. Younger races were no longer children to nurture but assets to manage. The @Altarans came to see themselves not as shepherds but as rightful rulers, their divine mission reinterpreted as a license for dominion.
The Seven Archons
The seven original mortals became the Archons, demigod-like rulers whose authority derived directly from the Mother of Souls and was accountable only to her—which, given her eternal silence, meant no accountability at all. They were not immortal. Each died, their soul passing into the nethereal, but their knowledge endured.
Upon death, an Archon’s intellectual essence transferred into a mement, a nethereal repository sigil. This accumulated wisdom could be bestowed only upon a single successor, chosen during the Archon’s lifetime. Thus were established seven lines of inheritance—chains of teacher-to-successor stretching across millions of years, each new Archon a distinct individual inheriting the accumulated knowledge of predecessors.
The system ensured continuity but also stagnation. Dogma accumulated alongside wisdom; each generation inherited not only insight but the prejudices and rigidities of its forebears. The mement preserved the intellect of the dead, not their capacity for growth or humility.
The Seven Providences
@Altaran history divides into seven Providences—seven iterations of the same theocracy, each rising from the previous collapse and each shorter, more violent, and more degraded than the last.
The First Providence endured seventy-two million years, a civilization of genuine wisdom and relative benevolence. Its collapse came with the Disappearance of Kurzae, when most @Altarans vanished. The Second lasted nineteen million years; the Third, over six million, during which the apocalyptic Flotilla of Ardent was built. The Fourth fell after two million years to a single human psion, the Warrior of Star-Break, who had witnessed Altaran oppression and swore to destroy them, but failed in the end. The Fifth lasted under a million; the Sixth, five hundred thousand, ended by the rebellion of warlord-sorceressVeheloth-Nyr, who declared the Mother of Souls a false religion. The Seventh endured barely sixty thousand years.
Each successive Providence was more hostile, destructive, and prideful. The sacred mandate to guide younger races became a mandate to dominate, then to punish. Each “reformation” was a desperate attempt to reclaim lost glory. Technologies were lost, infrastructure decayed, and the elegant philosophy of early ages calcified into rigid dogma whose original meaning was forgotten while its forms were obsessively preserved. By the Seventh Providence, the civilization wielded immense power solely through inherited artifacts it could no longer replicate or understand.
Hierarchy of Species
The early Providences were exclusively @Altaran. After the Fifth’s fall, the devastated civilization incorporated other species—through conquest or promises of protection. At its height, roughly one quarter of the population was @Altaran; humans were the most numerous, followed by many other races. Yet Altarans dominated every sphere of power, a disparity enforced by law, culture, and one deliberate deception.
Biological immortality technology had existed since the First Providence and could have easily been adapted for any species. The @Altarans claimed otherwise, insisting that the immortality process and the psi-gate network could only interface with @Altaran biology. This was a lie. Had humans and others gained eternal life and resurrection, the @Altarans would quickly have become a minority in their own civilization. Population control was maintained under a guise of biological limitation, a fraud sustained across millions of years.
The Character of the Chosen
By the time of their first contact with the Endless Unity, the Providence was a fallen elder civilization in every sense. The @Altarans had declined from whatever wisdom their ancestors possessed, becoming scheming, deceitful, and casually cruel—their pride swollen in exact proportion to their diminishment. They projected elegance: exquisite artwork, sleek starships, labyrinthine cities of aesthetic perfection. Outsiders often mistook this surface for utopia. Those inside knew it as insulation for a rigid, oppressive hierarchy.
The @Altarans maintained dominance through manipulation. Servant species—the bulky, servile ayrhun; the warlike, four-legged tuiyon, conditioned for fanatic loyalty—were products of millennia of genetic and social engineering. Even free species were managed through the psi-gate network, which dangled immortality as an exclusive birthright. Mandatory fanatic prayer-rituals to the Mother of Souls reinforced caste: worshippers could pray only with social equals. To invite another to pray together was an honor and a declaration of status. The theocracy was total.
The Final Providence
The Seventh Providence was the shortest, most fanatical, and most brittle. The sacred mandate of protection had become a doctrine of absolute supremacy. When it encountered the Endless Unity—a young, materialist, expansionist civilization—the Chosen saw not a peer but a 'Great Devourer' of one their ancient prophesies - of auguric foretellings that they had themselves long forgotten the meaning of.
The War of the Chosen was a collision between a dying elder theocracy and a rising hyper-industrial power. The Providence wielded inherited weapons of immense potency but could not replace its losses; their enemy could.
The war ended the Seventh Providence and the @Altaran civilization as a political entity. Some post-war sages among surviving @Altarans later concluded that the Unity had performed an unintended mercy. The Providence had been dying for millions of years; had it collapsed on its own, its death throes might have inflicted far greater harm on the galaxy’s younger races. The Unity did not save the Providence—but it may have saved everyone else from it.
The Altarisian Freehold
The conquest of the Seventh Providence should, by all historical precedent, have ended in atrocity. The Chosen expected massacre. What occurred was assimilation; as brutal and absolute as the war that preceded it, tolerating no failure to all but instantly adapt. The Unity established occupation governance, dismantling the Archons' theocracy and replacing it with meritocratic administration. Biomanufactories were constructed to produce @Altarans alongside humans, their genetic codes integrated into the same sequencers that generated the Unity's own subspecies. To @Altarans who expected annihilation, this was deliverance. To the fanatical, it was a fate worse than extermination: the systematic erasure of their identity as a chosen people.
The experiment lasted less than a decade before the Great Schism severed contact with the home territories. The occupation authority—a sprawling expeditionary force spread across conquered Providence space—found itself stranded. No orders came. No reinforcements were possible. Allegiances fractured as commanders declared for emerging post-Unity factions or attempted neutrality, awaiting a central authority that would never reestablish contact. The occupation collapsed into confusion, neglect, and sporadic violence.
From this paralysis, the @Altarisian Freehold emerged. It was not a conquest, rebellion, or restoration, but an improvisation—a coalition of former Unity administrators, @Altaran reformers, human colonists from both civilizations, and local leaders wearied of waiting. Rejecting both the theocracy of the old Providence and the authoritarianism of the defunct Unity, the Freehold champions radical individual liberty and voluntary association, hoping to forge something neither empire managed alone.
It is an experiment born of naivety and goodwill in equal measure. The Freehold possesses no unifying ideology beyond its rejection of the past. Its charter promises freedoms its government lacks the power to guarantee; its economy, severed from both Unity supply chains and Providence infrastructure, struggles for stability. Local autonomy frequently devolves into lawlessness. Yet for all its dysfunction, it represents something genuinely new: a state where broken @Altarans and stranded humans attempt coexistence, if only because no alternative remains.