The War of the Chosen

The War of the Chosen was the great, genocidal that the elder civilization known as 'The Chosen' had unleashed upon the Endless Unity. For the Chosen, this was the first military campaign on a galactic scale that they had fought in over thirty-six thousand years, and it would be one that would see the end of their civilization. To both sides, this war was not just any ordinary war, fought with weapons and martial prowess, but a war of ideologies and belief - one which would dictate the very survival of both the Endless and the Chosen.

Centuries before the war, the Endless Unity had heard of the Chosen and their Providence, mainly from scattered reports and galactic rumors peddled by the lesser species and civilizations of the galaxy. The Chosen, conversely, knew nothing of the great empire that had sprung so quickly from the wastelands of a barren world, until the Endless had already established outposts and colonies on the borders of their Providence, and first-contact procedures were carried out. At first, neither civilization imagined the other to be an enemy or a threat to their existence, with the Chosen believing the young and fledgling human empire to be beneath their worries, and the Endless naively believing that the Chosen would not have any reason to attack them. But as years passed and both gained opportunities to study the other more closely, these beliefs would quickly be washed aside.

The Chosen saw conflict with the Endless as an inevitability, and so first tried to break the Endless Unity from within, using subterfuge and deception on a galactic scale. One must understand - that just as the Chosen were not warriors at heart, neither were many of their followers. Instead of acting through direct martial might, the Chosen disdained the toils and hardships that came with war. Thus they preferred to rule from the shadows - using manipulations, deceit, subterfuge, and assassination to further their goals, and to turn their enemies against one-another. For several years, the Chosen had attempted to do this to the Endless as well, but found their target to be resistant to such schemes. Decieved by the manipulations of the Chosen, entire sectors broke free of the Prime Council’s control - and declared themselves the vassals of the Chosen. To the Endless Unity, these systems and worlds became known as the Betrayer Colonies. Even Valunon Thienkor, as peaceful as the man was compared to his predecessors and those who would succeed him, could not stand by and allow this treachery to take place. Naturally, the Betrayer-Colonies were destroyed - their worlds melted or torn to splinters by numerous barrages of inter-system missiles, and their stars blasted into novae. Over three thousand systems were destroyed in mere days, in a tragedy that would be forever remembered as the Purge of the Betrayer Colonies. Of course, the Endless harboured no illusions as to who ultimately stood behind this tragedy; who had knowingly forced their hand.

Fearing the technological supremacy and psionic power of the Chosen, Valunon Thienkor still tried desperately to avert a direct war, to the disdain of many within the Prime Council who argued that war was already an inevitability, and that the Endless Unity’s idleness would only invite more such attacks. Soon, those who called for decisive action and violence would be vindicated, for the lack of decisive action against the Chosen had led them to believe that their opponent was weak and unable to defend themselves, while the destruction of the colonies offered the very excuse that they needed to bring war upon the Endless.

The proponents of war within the Providence argued, that since many in the Betrayer-Colonies had become sympathetic to the Chosen and had taken up the worship of the Mother of Souls, their deaths were thus an attack on all the Chosen, and all who followed their faith. Within weeks, great corefleets were sent to punish the Endless for their impudence, and with warships superior in number and technology managed to cut through any defenses arrayed against them almost without effort. The Endless had underestimated the Providence’s bloodlust and willingness to go to war over such a thing, and were caught unprepared - but the Chosen had also miscalculated, and had underestimated the sheer number of their foes, and the size of their empire.

The battles that erupted from the Chosen invasion lit the galaxy in a fire not seen in millennia. Powerful psions and sleeper-agents of the Chosen were activated across all the Unity’s key worlds, resulting in terror attacks that turned a million worlds barren and lifeless. Never in their history had the Endless known such a fearsome foe, whose immense prowess on the field of battle was matched with expertise in guile and deceit. Faced with an enemy that struck them from the shadows and from within as often as from without, the Endless took upon their battlecry - “Truth and Power”. The Endless fought this war for their civilizational truth - for common beings in the galaxy to be united and powerful, able to stand against the false gods who sought to control them.

With greater technology and fleets of superior size, the warriors of the Providence seemed unstoppable. But this was not to be for long, for the Chosen did not yet know that Endless Unity had prepared for such a war, and that this was one of the reasons that their empire had settled so many systems. The Endless Unity was large enough that it would take the Providence’s fastest warships decades to merely traverse its reaches, which meant that any victory for the Chosen would not come soon. The Endless had time on their side - enough to mobilize their society and their entire civilization for total war.

The Chosen had inadvertently taught the Endless much through conflict and war, and as decades passed, their enemy was slowly becoming stronger. Every day, new warships were manufactured by the thousands, fitted with superior technology and more capable than what the Endless had before. The numbers and resources of the Endless Unity were all but infinite, where those of the Chosen were not. Slowly, the war began to turn against them.

Even after decades of war and the razing of countless star-systems, Supreme Overseer Valunon Thienkor was magnanimous enough to offer his foes peace. To the Chosen, accepting this offer would mean accepting the Endless as their equal, and rejecting their own percieved superiority. It would mean accepting defeat, and that their power was not limitless. The Chosen would never do this, and perhaps Valunon Thienkor knew as much. Thus, when the Chosen learned that they could not wipe away the Endless Unity in a simple war, they chose to escalate the war into a holy war, and unleash the Flotilla of Ardent.

The fleet that had been built up over one-hundred thousand years to fight the prophesied ‘Great Devourer’ was then unleashed upon the Endless, and the War of the Chosen entered a new phase. Faced by a new fleet fielding more warships than there are stars in the galaxy, the Endless were forced back once more - this time, without much hope of prevailing against a fleet so numerous and powerful. Instead of seeking a way to defeat their enemy and win their war, some within the Unity began pondering on how they might leave the galaxy entirely, to flee to a place where the Chosen would not be able to pursue them. For the first time, such individuals were not persecuted as defeatists or saboteurs, and their plans were seriously discussed and pondered upon by the Endless Unity’s most senior leadership. The activation of the Flotilla of Ardent had caught the Unity off-guard, and had filled their hearts with the prospect of defeat and death. Then, there was betrayal.

By the time the advances of the Flotilla of Ardent had ceased, many could see who the war’s ultimate victor would soon be. Despite the insurmountable forces the Chosen had arrayed against them, the war would continue for many decades to come, spanning battlefields from Konos to the fringes Daltarian Corridor and the voids of Volusharn. The final blow that the Endless Unity would strike against the Providence was called ‘Operation Nemesis’ - a comprehensive offensive on a scale, operational complexity, and vengeance-filled ferocity anything the galaxy had yet seen. The Altaran sacred world and the Providence’s capital of Azhillian was conquered and occupied, and for a short moment it seemed as though the war had ended in the total victory of the Endless. But once more, betrayal would strike from the shadows.

Just as the War of the Chosen had ended, Antarof Gorseon carried out another, much more secret operation, known simply as ‘The Black Order’. This decapitation strike was aimed at the entirety of the Endless Unity’s leadership and the infrastructure that was critical to maintaining communications within the Endless Unity, and was vital for its very existence. When the Black Order was carried out, the Endless Unity ceased to be united - government and leadership was lost, Index communications were destroyed, and starcharts were wiped clean all across the billions of star-systems of the Endless Unity. Though it was not Antarof Gorseon’s intent to do anything more than seize absolute power, and to wield that power to reshape the Endless Unity - his betrayal instead singlehandedly destroyed it. And though the Providence of the Chosen was destroyed absolutely, the Endless Unity was also shattered at its end.