The Providence of the Chosen was, in its later iterations, a sprawling multi-species polity. Dozens of distinct races lived beneath @Altaran rule, arranged in descending tiers of privilege and function. Most remain present in the galaxy today, their descendants scattered across the @Asar and @Avandeal metachors and along the fringes of @Eclismund and @Ragon.
Altarans
The @Altaran are an ageless species, tall and slender, standing roughly two-point-three meters on average. Their skin is a pale cerulean blue, their features elegant and faintly alien—slightly pointed ears, overlarge luminous eyes with pale silver-white irises, a subtle flattened nasal ridge. Many are psionically attuned; a minority by any measure, but still a higher percentage than in almost any other species.
They were also vain. The @Altaran sense of superiority was not mere prejudice but a cultural inheritance stretching back tens of millions of years, reinforced by the knowledge that they were among the galaxy's few surviving elder civilizations. The @Altaran did not merely believe they were superior. They believed it was self-evident, proven by the simple fact that they had endured while lesser civilizations rose and vanished like sparks. This hubris defined them, producing the grace and beauty that permeated their civilization and the casual cruelty with which they managed the species beneath them. The @Altaran of the Seventh Providence were not the wise shepherds their ancestors had aspired to be. They were a decadent ruling class presiding over a dying empire, their pride undimmed by decline.
Humans of the Providence
@Baseline Humans were the most numerous species in the old Providence, outnumbering even the @Altarans. Absorbed during the Fifth Providence's expansion, they were viewed with a mixture of amusement and condescension—funny creatures with such short lives, so disunited, squabbling among themselves like children. Yet some rose to prominence as engineers and skilled workers, their adaptability compensating for what they lacked in longevity. Their overall status remained that of a servant species—useful, numerous, and firmly beneath notice.
In the decades since the War of the Chosen, these humans have struggled to integrate with those of the fallen Endless Unity. The rift is not merely genetic, though by almost any objective measure Providence @Baseline Human stock is inferior to the engineered chargants. Unity humans were shaped by rigid materialist ideology, their society built around meritocratic advancement and relentless optimization. Providence humans grew up in a theocracy, defined by faith, hierarchy, and the rhythms of a civilization that measured time in millions of years. Each group finds the other difficult. Unity humans see their Providence cousins as backward, lazy, and superstitious. Providence humans see Unity chargants as cold, obsessive, and spiritually hollow. For all the talk of a united species, the two keep apart, their mutual distaste an unspoken constant in the camps and resettlement zones where they share space.
@Ayrhun
The @Ayrhun are a bulky, green-skinned humanoid species with some reptilian features, their history tracing back millions of years to human stock absorbed into the Providence during the Fifth Providence's expansion. Aeons of genetic editing have rendered them highly distinct from @Baseline Humans, their frames denser, their musculature more efficient, their cognitive architecture rewired for absolute obedience. They stand slightly shorter than @Altarans, with broad shoulders and thick limbs, their faces heavy-boned and impassive.
The @Ayrhun were engineered to serve. They formed the Providence's menial workforce, staffing the infrastructure that @Altarans considered beneath their attention—waste processing, cargo handling, basic maintenance, agricultural labor. They were conditioned to obey any order without hesitation, even to the point of pain or death, yet @Altaran culture outwardly professed care for their welfare. An Ayrhun in good condition was a sign of a conscientious master. Their society, such as it was, organized around the households and institutions they served, with Ayrhun adopting the status of their @Altaran overseers as their own. They did not resist because the concept of resistance had been bred out of them.
Today, feral @Ayrhun populations thrive on former Providence worlds, their original conditioning degraded by two million years without @Altaran oversight. On @Selenara, they have built sprawling hive-cities managed by parasitic nanite fungi that replaced their original obedience programming. Elsewhere, in the @Asar and @Avandeal metachors, Ayrhun communities survive in the ruins of old Providence infrastructure, their descendants slowly developing cultural identities they were never designed to possess.
@Tuiyon
The @Tuiyon are a four-legged, warlike species bred for aggression and loyalty in equal measure. Twice as large as a human, with powerful limbs and a heavy, muscular frame, they were the Providence's martial servants—shock troops, security forces, and enforcers of @Altaran will. In combat they wear specialized powered exosuits with integrated weaponry. Outside of battle they serve in nearly every capacity, from personal attendants to industrial workers, conditioned to fanatical devotion to their perceived masters.
The @Tuiyon are fully sentient, capable of speech, and possess an intricate internal social hierarchy based entirely on martial prowess. In the absence of external enemies, they fight among themselves, though rarely to the death. Their aggression is not rage but a cultivated instinct, honed across thousands of generations of selective breeding.
On @Selenara, the feral @Tuiyon have evolved into the Nexus variant—enormous, ten-meter-tall monstrosities that barely resemble their civilized cousins, augmented by self-repairing nanite colonies, hunting in coordinated packs across the shattered biozones. Elsewhere in former Providence space, @Tuiyon populations maintain something closer to their original forms, often hiring themselves out as mercenaries to post-Unity factions that value their discipline and combat instincts. They struggle with the absence of masters to serve, some descending into aimless violence, others forming rigid martial orders that substitute internal codes for external commands.
@Vyraia
The @Vyraia are tall, elegant humanoids with skin containing millions of chromatophore cells, allowing them to project intricate patterns of light and color across their entire bodies. They were created by the @Altaran for a single purpose: aesthetic pleasure. Living art, performing displays of shifting luminescence that could fill entire chambers with moving constellations of color. They served no practical function. They were a status symbol, a sign of @Altaran refinement, and the species' entire existence was an expression of @Altaran ego—the vanity of a civilization that considered itself so elevated that it could create sentient beings purely for decoration.
The @Vyraia are proud, competitive, and acutely aware of their own beauty. Their internal hierarchy is based entirely on the complexity and elegance of their displays, with the most accomplished performers once achieved a celebrity status within @Altaran high society. Their art is genuinely extraordinary; a @Vyraia performance can reduce observers to tears or induce states of meditative transcendence. But they were never free. Their existence was defined by the tastes of their @Altaran patrons, and those who failed to please were quietly recycled into the biological stock from which new @Vyraia were grown.
When the Endless Unity conquered the Providence, it deemed the @Vyraia's existence as living decoration a cruelty greater than their destruction. Euthanasia programs began, framed as mercy. But total outright extermination of an entire species was taboo—too close to what the @Altarans had attempted against the Unity itself—so Unity bureaucrats ordered the creation of a heavily altered biomanufactory variant instead. The variant served no function beyond what the existing chargants already performed; it existed solely because its existence allowed the Unity to claim it had not committed genocide - the definition of which, according to Unity law, stretched no further than 'the total extermination of a species; including its history, and culture'.
Regardless; the Great Schism halted both programs before completion. These altered @Neo-Vyraia are seen by baseline @Vyraia almost as a mockery; certainly not recognized as kin.
Remnant baseline populations survive in scattered enclaves, especially in @Asar and the fringes of @Eclismund. They are few, haunted, and purposeless. Some search for new meaning. Others simply perform for each other in private. Amid the chaos of the Great Schism—countless factions at war, no common authority, most populations struggling merely to survive—the @Vyraia are too obscure and too useless for anyone to waste ammunition on. No one is hunting them. No one is looking for them. They simply persist in the cracks, beneath notice, and that indifference is the only protection they have.
Across the post-Unity, post-Providence galaxy, the surviving species of the Providence are shunned. Too much bad blood remains from the War of the Chosen, too much xenophobic hatred for anything associated with the @Altaran theocracy. @Baseline Humans of Providence origin are regarded as backward, genetically obsolete relics; the @Ayrhun and @Tuiyon as living symbols of @Altaran arrogance. The @Vyraia are pitied or ignored; an irony that is sharpest for the @Neo-Vyraia, who were created by Unity scientists and never knew the Providence at all, yet are tarred by the same brush—despised by the very civilization that manufactured them.
Only within the @Asar Metachor, under the faltering authority of the @Altarisian Freehold, do these scattered peoples find something resembling a common home. The Freehold is too weak to enforce tolerance, but its founding ideal—rejection of both Providence theocracy and Unity authoritarianism—has made it a reluctant sanctuary, the one place where the dispossessed of both empires can coexist without pretending to be anything other than what they are.