LORE

Across the cosmos, universes dance in an eternal cycle of bloom and death, each giving rise to the next in a celestial chain.

The Untari stood as keepers of this passage, gathering memory, meaning, and the weight of lives fully lived from each dying universe to carry into the next.

After eons of witnessing perpetual birth, destruction and grief, the Untari broke their sacred covenant and reached into a dying universe. Not to gather its memories but to save its life.

Despite this powerful act of love, they were crushed under the weight of the collapse.

Enitahn survived. He obeyed his command to stand apart as a final safeguard and watched his brothers and sisters die the universal collapse.

But he would live. And he would live with a wound, a mutilation savaged again and again by doubt, sorrow, and shame. He gave his wound a name:

AEZĀN WAKE.

In this new universe, the dance of matter and energy eventually crossed a sacred threshold and birthed Shima, the first consciousness.

She possessed one gift: She could kindle the light of conscious experience in others. And oh, how she wanted to.

Alone in the cathedral of existence, Shima felt the ache of being the only presence who knew it was beautiful.

So she gave her gift away. Her power flowed outward like a river finding the sea, touching worlds beyond counting. Life began to stir. Organisms blooming into beings who could look up at the stars and feel something.

Her children learned wonder, connection, joy. They also learned cruelty, domination, fear. The same awareness that allowed them to love allowed them to hate.

Shima could not understand, these shadows did not exist in her. She gave her children everything. She didn't know that everything included this.

And each time she revealed herself, to nurture them as siblings, they responded with worshipful adoration or sickening fear. So she withdrew.

In the fullness of time, after countless powers rose and fell, three civilizations rose to prominence.

The Xanthians built monuments to exploration and mastery of the mind. Their technological marvels are anchored in ancient tradition.

Despite their arcane heritage, they deify reason, chasing a desperate hope: a universe understood completely might finally be made safe. Predictable. Quiet.

The Shi'Qar were forged in harsher fire. And despite their best efforts, they evolved as predators and carried a predator's values into the stars.

Their codes of honor exist not only from virtue but necessity, to keep them from consuming themselves.

The Rajnik are not a species.

They are a coarse conglomeration of dreamers, magnates, murderers, scoundrels and exiles sprawled across a world of neon excess, encrusted atop a frozen wasteland.

Sagis 5 - their world - had natives once. Their name has been lost to the teeming masses who came after. They still exist. But only to be exploited.

Sagis 5 exists because every faction needs somewhere to meet enemies unseen and somewhere to satisfy desires too forbidden for proper worlds.

Rajnik are dangerous because they refuse to protect anyone. Protection creates obligation. Obligation becomes entanglement. Entanglement puts you on the field instead of above it.

When war between Xanthians and Shi'Qar threatened to swallow star systems, Shima intervened. She bestowed power upon the Mi'Jai a warrior order. To preserve balance, not impose it, led by their spiritual father Zephyr Odu.

And rising among the warrior ranks, Azraem: an orphan born where Xanthian and Shi'Qar blood should never have met, circumstances shrouded in sorrow. Gifted. Idealistic. Burning with conviction that peace was worth any sacrifice.

On a world turned charnel house by the war, Azraem led his legion to battle.

Challenged to single combat, he struck down the Xanthian High Commander who wouldn't yield. Something ancient and terrible erupted through his veins, detonating the Commander and thousands of his soldiers in the blast.

Azraem lowered his hand, looked upon the devastation, and understood.

The endless years of conflict had scoured something essential from Azraem's soul.

The idealism remained, but it had curdled into something harder. He set out to bring every faction to heel. The galaxy knelt to a single throne. Wars ended by decree. A silence that resembled peace spread across the stars.

But Zephyr Odu saw what this peace truly was, domination wearing a gentle mask. He and Enitahn confronted Azraem together.

Azraem did not repent. He did not pretend regret. He believed in what he had become. The battle that followed scarred the heavens. When it ended, they stripped Azraem of his cosmic powers and cast him into the outer darkness. They did not kill him. That was their mistake.

Azraem's empire spanned the galaxy, including supply lines, networks, and administrative structures keeping worlds functioning. Dismantling it would create chaos; the factions would rush to fill the vacuum.

But maintaining it meant preserving the ghost of a despot.

Odu chose stability over justice. The Mi'Jai became stewards of a structure they had not designed, enforcing a peace they had not chosen. It worked. But this wasn't harmony. This was a held breath, a peace built on the bones of tyranny.

A generation later, the great powers attempted reconciliation. The Xanthian Chancellor and Shi'Qar Queen would exchange their firstborn heirs on neutral ground.

The heirs were to eventually wed into their host civilizations, creating lineages enmeshed at the highest levels of galactic power.

For one moment, the galaxy believed in harmony. Then the Onassis Moon turned to fire. The architects remained hidden. The fragile order shattered completely.

In the aftermath, the Shi'Qar, without their queen, fractured into warring clans that turned their fury on each other. The Xanthians retreated behind their borders, nursing grief and paranoia in equal measure.

The Mi'Jai, under Odu, scrambled to prevent total collapse. They succeeded. Barely.

A cold peace settled over the galaxy. Not harmony, something closer to exhaustion. The factions eyed each other across borders drawn in blood, waiting for the next betrayal.

Shima, sensing fault lines beneath the surface peace, initiates one final act before entering her rest. Within the Mi'Jai, two children are born. Iman and Orion.

Orion emerges as Mi'Jai males always have, but he carries markings no Mi'Jai has ever borne. Gold tracings across his head and back, luminous against his skin. And within him, dormant but undeniable, sleeps the same vast power that once consumed Azraem.

Iman emerges female. The first in all Mi'Jai history. She carries the same golden markings, the same unprecedented origin. Where Orion holds raw power, she holds something equally rare, an essence that cuts through illusion, and exposes what others cannot bear to witness.

They are Shima's final safeguard. Her last hope if all is lost.

The siblings pass through the Change, the metamorphosis that transforms Mi'Jai from children to warriors. They are bound in ways neither fully understands, as if they are two expressions of a single soul.

Orion is a protector by nature. People love him but his presence is most felt in his absence. He fears the power coiled within him and spends his solitude trying to keep it leashed.

His faith in the Mi’Jai oath is absolute. His doubt is only in himself.

Iman carries a kindness that lives on the sharp edges of unfiltered truth. Others read it as attack. The space that raised her cannot fully hold her, but it sharpens what she is. Parts of her remain homeless.

She questions not from rebellion but from recognition. She knows the order has limits because she is one of them.

Together, they are formidable. Apart, they are incomplete.

And far away, beyond the galaxy's edge, Azraem waits. Decades of exile have not broken him. They have refined him.

The fragile peace holds.