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>General state of the galaxy, plus ancient history spoilers No.1
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-i">Once upon a time, in a story far, far away</span>
At one point, there was a body stretching the galaxy and its satellites. Though never truly a confederation or even any longstanding pact, for such things have only been enforced by the Akerian Star Arks exterminating malignant civilizations, but what are essentially "phone-lines" of civilizations who speak but do not meet. Now that these venerable artifacts, once a common sight, were destroyed in the near billion-year era of consternation, the aptly named War in Heaven proceeding the disappearance of the Akerians as a civilization, plunging the galaxy into a new and godless age. The carefully seeded Lilim(1), minute in their differences yet united in reverence, were now bereft of the objective authority they had relied upon for so long for all the answers they could ever have dreamt of. And from the very Rim, those old ghost-tales and nightmares, then very real phantoms of an unimaginably cruel age. Beings and even entire races whose modes of thought and operation, at times even existence, are thoroughly inimical to the continued life of the Children of the Akerians. These endless horrors spilled out into these atomized states, and the death knell of untold trillions are said to echo in the Sea of Souls to this very day. The Shadows, intent on bringing chaos everywhere to fuel evolution, the psychovoric Xu-ha, leaving whole systems filled by pristine husks drained of their very minds, the Swarm, an unending wave of ravenous chitin, sweeping world after world clean of life, breeding rampantly throughout their ceaseless binge, directed by a sinister intelligence whose true heart was never probed even at the height of the Akerian's Enforcement, and THEM, the Ones-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, appearing as an undescript scratching at the back of the mind, the victim never realizing until it is too late. Lesser threats also became serious nuisances, as the millennia of interregnum before any humanoid race figured to use the inheritances the Akerians left to defend them, were overwhelmed. Though a precious few of those frontier beings were also recipients of the gift, which in it's most base form allowed the recipients to reach each other. The ancestors of the modern Akerataeli, in a lesser way the Grubs, theirs a civilization of dreaming philosophers, and the Mindriders, one of those races that were old when the Akerians were young, whose intimate habitation of minds lets them "understand". Soon, galactic civilization recovered, reaching out again, concentrated pockets in a tablet washed clean. War and violence, ever the constant with the human form, something the Akerians, of humanity themselves, understood better than anyone. Why then, did they continue seeding this form? Was there wisdom that may only be known be having existed as long as them? No one knew or cared much at that time.
1) It should be obvious what this is referencing</span>
