Story Universe

The Blight of the Ancients

It started as rumors brought to spaceports by explorers, travelers and traders. A malady of soul and mind was affecting entire worlds of the Young Races. Those affected were filled with mistrust, foreboding and ill-thoughts to the point that they took action to harm themselves and those around them. The malady quickly spread from star system to star system throughout the galaxies of La’Aït, like an uncontrolled fire eluding all efforts to contain it and consuming on its wake many of the Young Races.

The Åh made many attempts to stamp out the disease, but its nature and cause were beyond their understanding. Thus, nothing they did stopped the spread and the onslaught.

Eventually, after 40 millennia, the ravages of the Blight ceased with the intervention of the same beings who had created the Aïdin Planets. Yet the damage to the psyche of the Young Races had already been done — Fear was the face of that damage, that unwelcome guest who has been with us since then. Mistrust of others then replaced the easiness of friendship that had existed among all civilizations, and culture and commerce were no longer shared freely between worlds. Interest in the Aïdin Planets also waned, to the point that after a few millennia hardly anyone remembered their locations and the beings who dwelt on them. Ultimately no one could find them, having mysteriously vanished from known Space.

For millions of years in the aftermath of the Blight, the Åh sought to restore to wellbeing the Young Races using all that was within their power. They made some progress, but their efforts never succeeded completely.

To make matters worse, the Dark Power from beneath Space hadn’t finished Its crusade against the Young Races, and a new onslaught It was planning.

The War of the Kskiln

They came swiftly from beyond La’Aït, so the Legends remember, like swarms of locusts riding on the inter-galactic winds. They descended upon star systems, consuming on their path entire bio-spheres, and reducing to atomic powder all things and beings on them. But above all, they delighted in siphoning off the bio-energy of the Young Races. “Kskiln” the Legends call those beings — meaning, ‘fire devourers’. Rumors at the time whispered they were one of the many groups of the Åh whose hearts had become corrupted, but no one truly knew.

The offensive was unleashed in multiple fronts, forcing entire worlds to flee in terror. At the time, in the vast multi-galactic space of La’Aït, war was unknown, since the Young Races by nature were not suited to conflict. Thus they had no defensive systems. The assault wasn’t truly a war but more like a shadow of Death spreading its wings. The Kskiln were not bio-souls like the Young Races, nor had they the light and beauty of the Åh. Clouds of a coiled dark fire, that’s how they looked, moving unimpeded across inter-stellar and inter-planetary spaces at astonishing speeds.

The Legends speak of many battles in the inter-stellar expanses in which the Åh confronted the Kskiln in their effort to protect the Young Races — ‘the War in the Heavens’ so the ancient lore remembers those clashes. But these only made a dent in the attackers, such was their number, power and viciousness.

The War of the Kskiln raged for over 40 million of our years, and inflicted a great damage to the three main galaxies in La’Aït — Alaïs, Laïs and Cealaïs, that is the Andromeda, the Milky Way and the Triangle Galaxies. Eventually the Kskiln were defeated by a mysterious group of beings who came from beyond known Space.

In the end, many sentient races were annihilated, forgotten to history; most of those who survived were displaced from their home star systems, scattered throughout the galaxies; and for an unknown reason contact with the Åh ceased. But most mysterious of all, the harmonic frequencies of light that made Space in the Local Group of Galaxies descended a whole tonal scale.

The end of this War marked the end of the Age of Legends.

It was several millennia after that, mysteriously, as a fully developed sentient race, Humans appeared on dozens of uninhabited worlds of seven of the galaxies of La’Aït, all of them almost simultaneously.