Wyld Odyssey Lore

The End of the Second Age of Man

The tale of the Third Age of Man begins with the close of the Second, and it is not the tale that might have been expected. The time was one of turmoil; Creation languished in it's most diminished state, waning and on the edge of being snuffed out entirely. The influence of the Yozis and even the Neverborn cut deep, horrific scars into Creation, while Creation's rightful rulers and protectors were imprisoned, then released; to dismay, as half of them became something far worse. The old powers that sought to keep them down could not do so, but they singlemindedly continued in their attempts to try. As those who should have defended Creation raised their hands to one another, the power of those who sought to subjugate or destroy Creation grew exponentially, outside the vision of those who had been charged with foreseeing and foretelling such events.

Autochthonia

It was during this time that another force thought long-forgotten emerged: the return of the Great Maker; it was quiet, at first, with scouting forays and a few Champions looking carefully around a world that was alien to them, but those in power picked up on the disturbance they caused. Everyone's plans were put on hold, to best consider how these new, strange people fit into their schemes. The sudden appearance of the Chosen of Autochthon caught everyone off-guard, as they made their first attempts to foray into Creation, to meet the Creation-Born, getting into minor conflicts, and establishing minor trade relations. The pause produced by the appearance of the Champions of Autochthonia saved the world; it allowed the vital time for certain golden heroes to expand their powers, to prepare to make their move.

That move was made by five of the Chosen of the Sun, a full, perfect Circle. A Dawn by the name of Uris Calan, a warrior without peer; a Zenith by the name of Brilliant Sunfire, dedicated to shining the light of Sol Incarnate into all dark corners of all places; a Twilight by the name of Redak, a Lookshan-born savant without peer; a Night by the name of Shadowed Glory, and an Eclipse by the name of Cynis Ekera, a negotiator and martial artist without measure. Into the dark realm of Autochthonia they ventured with one goal; to restore the Great Maker in the hopes that the last unfettered, accessible Primordial might be strong enough to secure Creation's borders against those who invaded it.

That they succeeded was nothing short of miraculous. How they succeeded is a matter that has nearly caused religious wars and has caused untold amounts of speculation and theological debate. Each of the five had great stake in the completion of the goal; it involved no small amount of diplomacy and enlightenment, untold amounts of technical, medical and occult knowledge and practice, stealth, subtlety, guile and assassination, the illumination of the darkest places of Autochthonia, and endless hours of oil-drenched carnage.

The net result was an endless army of beguiled, bewitched and entranced mechanoid gods tirelessly toiling away to rearrange the Great Maker's interior, an endless swathe of destroyed Gremlins, a massive chunk excised clear out of Autochthonia, a dead secret fetich soul, and the Maker's Charms remade. This affected all of the divine ministers, though none so strongly as Ku, for where once was an abject coward was now a stuttering and quivering, timid creature; but one with the courage to face fear and the hope that things might get better.

The five Solar Heroes moved quickly; they rallied the eight Divine Ministers in the Core, and began to explain to them in stark, horrible truth; Creation lay besieged by the forces of the Yozis resurgent, and the dead Primordials sought the end of all things. They begged Autochthon for his aid, and of their initiative offered one thing he wanted very much; willingly they named themselves the Solar Deliberative and beseeched the Great Maker to undo the Geas their forefathers had compelled him to lay upon the Jadeborn. These horrible truths won at the cost of blood and the humble beseeching for the freedom of the Jadeborn begot a truth of Autochthon's own; that the Exalted had been cursed by the dying Primordials, and that he had been too afraid to risk telling anyone.

Such revelations stunned everyone; there was some anger among the five Golden Heroes, some who wanted to demand some kind of justice be exacted on Autochthon, but such talk was quickly quashed as futile and counterproductive. The past was done; the future emergent and bleak. They needed a solution [i]now[/i]. They attempted one; the empty city of Denandsor, housing the nearest Yu-Shan Gate, was chosen as their base of operations; the Golden Heroes having once attempted to penetrate it's ward of paranoia and fear in search of answers, knew roughly what could be expected but had withdrawn rather than risk their fellowship's integrity. Autochthon provided the answer; he summoned six Champions; one of each Caste, each of exceptional skill, bravery, and even more exceptional Clarity, and sent them to take the city. With the Empty City as their base, Autochthon coughed up his inhabitants, disgorging the Autochthonian people around the Empty City as a beachhead in Creation; and to put them safely out of the way as the changes he already felt beginning would take place.

State of Emergency

His Divine Ministers then strode into Yu-Shan, to announce their return, accompanied by the jouten of Autochthon himself. Finding Yu-Shan to be barely a shadow of it's former self, and it's self-appointed rulers to be in absentia, Autochthon, despite having recently learned to hope, felt despair again. In council with the five Solars who had repaired him, the state of affairs in Yu-Shan was discussed, having found a ruling society of Celestines who were aware to greater and lesser extents of the coming threats and took ineffective measures or no measures at all. Action was needed, and Autochthon took the unprecedented step of declaring himself the emergency ruler of Yu-Shan in order to bring the Creation-threatening crisis to a halt.

Had his declaration been heeded by all, immediately, it is possible that Creation might have been saved in the form it was known in. Naturally, opinion was immediately divided; though a surprisingly large amount of the Celestial Gods decided that even if Autochthon claimed emergency powers and never let them go they would be better off under Primordial rule than Yozi rule or being destroyed by the Abyssals, it went without saying that there were those who objected strongly - and in some cases, violently. The Bronze Faction in particular were convinced that Autochthon was being used as a puppet for a Solar coup, while the Gold faction ironically believed the opposite, and targeted Autochthon as manipulating the Chosen of the Sun with undue influence.

The resulting web of intrigue, politics, espionage, and assassination ultimately only came to a halt when the Aerial Legion submitted to the authority of Autochthon; in possession of not one but two spectacular armies and backed by more Celestial Exalted than Creation had ever known, Autochthon's authority was no longer questioned, nor was that of his allies.

Unfortunately, their efforts were too late. The Reclaimation had launched, as had several crusades of the dead. The Blessed Isle fell essentially immediately as the returned Scarlet Empress forced her dynasty to heel. The Autochthonians and their various allies worked swiftly, however; convincing the Seventh Legion to launch an all-out assault on the Realm to delay them, the Aerial Legion and the Champions of Autochthon prevented the Scarlet Empress from retaking the Imperial Manse as the Solars entered it, whilst tirelessly an army of Jadeborn worked to undermine the primary power source for the weapons it powered. The battle was an epic delaying action; it cost the lives of an uncountable number of Aerial Legionnaires as hordes of demons poured forth from Malfeas to augment the Dragon-Blooded Realm's forces, and fully one hundred and seven Champions were decommissioned in the battle, though thanks to the heroic efforts of Shadowed Glory, not a single Soulgem fell into the hands of the enemy.

Autochthon's world-body descended on the Imperial Mountain at the apex of the battle; his preferred people succeeded at undermining the geomancy of the Pole of Earth long enough for the changing Great Maker to rip the primary weapon systems straight out of the Pole, as well as abscond with the freed Jadeborn. The Imperial Manse was left in disarray, and when the Autochthonian and Heavenly forces withdrew, the Imperial City was a blazing ruin and the forces of the Reclaimation had been denied the Sword of Creation: a major coup, to say the least; up until the withdrawing forces learnt that their safe-harbor across the Inland Sea had been enveloped by the forces of the Death-Lord Mask of Winters, taking advantage of the Seventh Legion's engagement with the Realm to invade. They fled from one epic battle straight into another.

The Seventh Legion and Lookshy were decimated by the time the second battle was over; the city a ruin, most of Lookshy's advanced military hardware wrecked, it became abundantly clear that the Mask of Winters could have knocked them over at any time, nigh-trivally. This was an horrifying revelation for the defenders; and unfortunately, an emboldening one for the forces of the Underworld. It was but the first of the holocausts to come.

The Grim Calculation and The Radical Plan

It was then that Autochthon made the Grim Calculation. From careful observations of actual battles, from historical records and supposition, he calculated that the forces at the disposal of those who had appointed themselves the defenders of Creation could defeat the incoming foes... But that the war would serve to destroy very nearly everything in Creation, which would no longer resemble Creation in any meaningful way. The scope of destruction would be akin to that of the Balorian Crusade, Great Contagion, the Primordial War, the Aftershock War, the Time of Cascading Years, and the Usurpation and it's aftermath; all at once. In short, there would be no victors, only those who lost and those who were utterly annihilated.

It may have seemed like cowardice or despair, but Autochthon presented the facts with cold, logical precision, down to estimates to within the centamote of how much magical energy would be expended by the various classifications of combatants on all sides of the way. He certainly conceded that where the Exalted was concerned, statistics and numbers could very easily go awry in the face of epic heroism, but then he very pointedly reminded all in presence that now the enemy, too, had Exalted avatars of their chosen causes.

It was Ku, the Divine Minister who had been responsible for fear, and was now learning hope, who made the Radical Suggestion. Ku reasoned that once before, Autochthon had exiled himself from Creation, taking many with him; and all in secret. Working with the unprecedented might of Heaven and the Exalted backing him, they could secede Creation to it's enemies, yet deny them every reason they wanted Creation in the first place.

The plan was horrifying to all in attendance, yet the undeniable fact of the matter was that the alternative would be that everyone would die; after the chaos was over, Autochthon calculated that there would be less than two hundred unExalted mortals remaining, and those Gods who survived would be thoroughly insane. However, it was a step most radical to undertake; when Autochthon had declared emergency powers, attempts had been made to reach the Incarnae, but those who sought to reach them to have them step in and refuse Autochthon's power had found the Jade Pleasure Dome sealed. This time, it was Autochthon himself who attempted to open the dome; but he could not, and nor could the Chosen of the Sun nor of the Maidens, nor the Champions or the Chosen of the Moon. The Jade Dome remained ominously silent; in the end, a lowly Terrestrial Deity, Spinner of Glorious Tales a valued adviser to the original five Solars who had healed Autochthon, who said what everyone was thinking; that if the Incarnae cared not to be disturbed, then do not disturb them and leave them as they wish to be left. This answer, whilst grim, satisfied nearly everyone, as the Incarnae had done little but entertain themselves as Creation fell to ruin. No-one advocated it in such crude terms as 'leave them behind', merely 'do not interfere with them.'

The Century of War

The next hundred years were some of the most terrifying and busy that Creation had ever seen. Denandsor became a sprawling city the size of a nation, armed to the teeth and fully modular. New weapons were forged, and ancient weapons taken; the Solars seized control of the Five-Metal Shrike in short order, and battle raged for control of the Directional Titan Harmonious Gale, ultimately culminating in the return of the Titan, though damaged, to the state-city of Denandsor in need of repairs.

While battles of might waged across Creation, Heaven was a flurry of activity; with the full support of the Aerial Legion, the evacuation faction which had coalesced debated hotly over where to depart for. Many among the Alchemical Exalted suggested that the only obvious course was to return Elsewhere and reestablish the Seal of Eight Divinities, but this time it was clear that would not work; the volume of people being brought would make such an exile ultimately another instance of futility. It was decided; they had to flee into the Wyld.

Across Creation, the Exalted did battle, and they died in droves. Dragon-Blooded Exalts and young ones of all sorts patrolled the streets of the expanded Denandsor as the population grew and grew, the Patropoli and Metropoli growing high into the sky and low into the ground. The Solar and Lunar Exalted staged daring raids into the fortresses of Death Knights to seize Monstrances of Celestial Portion, but most especially those belonging to the Abyssals who turned renegade to their cause; while yet, tragically, some Solars were captured and turned into Abyssals. A raid was even staged on the Thing Infernal in an attempt to destroy Lillun, knowledge of whose existence had been extracted from a captured Infernal; though the attempt failed, the surviving raiders did abscond with samples of Helltech and annihilated a handful of the more experienced Infernals.

The setbacks were many. Once, a full Circle of Abyssal Exalted managed to get into Denandsor while all the Solars and most of the Lunars were away, unleashing Hekatonhires summoned from the Underworld. The resulting battle cost the lives of a thousand mortals, two dozen Terrestrials and four Champions; the aftershock battle when all the slain mortals promptly raised the next night as Hungry ghosts cost the lives of another two thousand mortals and half a dozen Terrestrials; all of the Abyssals escaped. Another time, a vast horde of howling, bestial wolf-goat men and ape-men emerged from the southern forest, attacking a weak, new Patropolis; their Exalted patrons wielded sorceries and magic to devastating effect, and the Patropolis was very nearly destroyed before sufficient Colossus Alchemicals and warstrider-piloting Terrestrials could arrive on-scene to fight back the seemingly endless horde. The battles were many, the heights of heroism as exceptional as they could be, matched only by the depraved depths of villainy to which the dedicated destroyers would stoop.

The Great Evacuation and Parting Shots

Disparate peoples were collected, and more and more divinities threw their lot in with the evacuators. However, they were faced with one undeniable fact; the battles being waged were holding actions, nothing more. Lives were spent, and even the Solar Exalted fell in terrible numbers. In the end, however, the evacuation was nearly completed; the survivors who had been camped in the massively-expanded Denandsor were taken back within Autochthon's world-body; but even those among the Alchemical Exalted who survived the wars found a radically different new home; the Realm of Brass and Shadow was no more, and instead they found the Realm of Dream and Synapse.

Unfortunately, they didn't have any time to explore their new world. The forces of the Underworld and Malfeas could be contained no longer, and so the final stage of the Great Evacuation was implemented; his world-body looming high over the only remaining traces of Denandsor, being the city's Manses and it's Yu-Shan Gate, great rays flashed out from Autochthonia in the final act of the Second Age, after the long deliberations with learned and wisened Gods, the brightest of the Exalted and the most humble of mortals. The first resource harvested was people; as once and now again, those who had not heeded the call to evacuation were compelled to it; both as a mercy to them, and out of a desire to deny as much of a resource as possible to the enemy. These beams caught up mortals and immortals alike; Dragon-Kings, the Jadeborn who remained in citadels too remote to evacuate them the normal way but too hardened for the lesser minions of death or hell to overrun, and all manner of surviving strange creatures.

As the mortals caught up in the emergency evacuation beam were collected, sorted, and stored for later, the final acts of Exalted epicry were taking place; the Silver Chair was boarded by a full thirty Lunars, no less than ten of them Elder. Their grim mission was simple: seize control of the Silver Chair; it's dwellers had not responded once to entreats from the Evacuators, and Luna herself being beyond reach, they saw no further option. Dirigible Engine Daystar needed no such seizure; Nysela, the Charioteer of the Daystar, had reluctantly agreed that continuing to do as had always been done was both suicidal and ultimately would diminish the chances of survival of those who were being evacuated.

As the Lunar Exalted stormed the Silver Chair to seize control of it, Exalted geniuses involved in the last evacuations of Heaven worked over-time at the Loom of Fate, destroying Pattern Spiders and introducing Design Weavers to prepare the Loom for transport and integration into the Design. Such a powerful device could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Yozis (to say nothing of the Neverborn!) and in any event, it would be necessary to continue the smooth reincarnation of the Sidereal Exalted, who most definitely could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Yozis or Neverborn.

The second step of the departure was perhaps more dramatic than the first; again beams lashed out, but instead of collecting people (and the souls of those who did not survive the collection) as the first set had, this time what was being harvested was resources; vast tracts of jungle, of farmland, of woodland, samples of everything growing were collected, but also unimaginable quantities of raw materials; the Magical Materials, of course, were of paramount priority, but so were relatively common materials such as fresh water, salt, clay, and ordinary metals of all stripes. It also caught up foodstuffs of all sort, including meat, of which a fair number of wild and living animals were misidentified as and collected, some of whom survived the process.

The third step was both spiteful and tactical. Creation was flensed of materials that they did not wish or could not take with them but which might be of material advantage to the enemies they would leave behind. The weapons stolen from the Imperial Mount a century ago had finally been incorporated into the World-Body of the Primordial that the Great Maker was becoming, fueled by the immense power within, and both the refit Shrike and Titan turned their weapons upon Creation as well. Creation itself was scoured, it's Geomancy attacked directly; Manses targeted, dragon lines deliberately exposed and compromised, and the very Elemental Poles themselves attacked. The Moon set after the reciept of the message indicating that the Lunar Exalted who had boarded it at the beginning of night had reached the core and were in control; the Daystar rose in Creation for the last time, and for the first time turned it's weapons in anger upon the world it had for so long protected.

The result was a cataclysm that dwarfed the Three Spheres incident. After the first blasts, the only living things remaining in Creation were those in the shielded citadels of the Death Lords and the Infernals, though after the last blasts only a half-handful of those had fallen. What they stood to inherit, however, was an entirely non-infernal hellscape, a blasted pocket of stability in the Wyld of boiled-away seas, earth scored down to the hot magma-blood below, a world whose Elemental Poles were gone; though the Dragons that had dwelled under them had long ago died in the wars, now they were truly extinguished.

Departure

The sun would set for the last time on Creation, and as the evacuees removed the last of the monitors from Heaven, those brave stalwarts who had held the near sides of the Yu-Shan Gates which were under the control of the enemies, an omen that stopped the heart of everyone present who had one occurred.

The doors of the Jade Pleasure Dome opened. What they beheld was beyond their wildest dreams of despair; a green sky-line tinging Yu-Shan from the far places where Infernal incursions were already beginning, seeking to make an end-run around the perimeters of death which surrounded the site which had once been Denandsor and attack the world-body from below, as all attacks from above and from the ground had failed. They saw the Colossus Alchemical Exalted moving the packed-up Loom towards the Denandsor gate, and the last few divinities marching stalwartly for their final evacuation, and beheld in horror that which had befallen. Their shock lasted for long moments, and it he-who-had-been Autochthon himself, in an encounter suit, who approached them.

"The name you once knew me by was Autochthon. What we have done is done and cannot be undone. We are leaving, you are more than welcome to come with us." The Celestines were confused - angry! The Games of Divinity had shut down, and they demanded an explanation; the Primordial explained to them of their failures to discharge their duty to protect Creation; how he had stepped in at the eleventh hour and voluntarily assumed their duties, and all had reached the consensus that Creation the place was doomed, but that Creation, the people, might be saved.

He had no time for their anger; his people were preparing to depart. He made it clear that if they stayed, they faced the Exalted Chosen of the Yozis and the Neverborn by themselves, without making any insulting references to his calculations as to their chances of survival, which he placed at nil. The Celestines were dumbfounded; even the Valor and Conviction of Sol Invictus gave way to his Temperance; the wisdom of the Great Dreamer was irrefutable. They had failed in their duties to protect Creation-the-place, as was evident by the nigh-total annihilation it had suffered, by the sweeping armies of demons and Infernals, the armies of the Dead and Abyssal Exalted who poured forth from monstrous places.

Broken, for the moment, by the revelation, they numbly agreed that their place was to go with what of Creation remained, and so went with the evacuees; Ignis Divine returned to the Daystar, sitting next to the coffin of a murdered Solar Queen to contemplate the magnitude of his first and only failure, while Luna returned to the Silver Chair, both astounded and horrified at the carnage that her Chosen had wreaked in seizing control of her domain; they offered no apology, but she offered no vengeance, as she stepped around the unconscious form of the Archer on the Silver Pass to take stewardship of her domain back from her Chosen, and the Maidens took refuge in the towers she had built for them upon the surface of the Chair.

Together, five craft departed from the wreckage of Creation, swatting from the skies all who dared to give chase, though few did, as stunned and disoriented as they were by the all-encompassing scorched earth they found. The largest by far dwarfed even the second largest, and the smallest was barely a speck; the unimaginably huge world-body of Autochthonia, which still retained it's old name out of respect for the once-Great Maker and his Chosen; the Silver Chair and Daystar, now orbiting Autochthonia at a vast distance, defining a perimeter for it; the Titan-Class Citadel Harmonious Gale, and the Five-Metal Shrike, both refitted to allow cruising speeds comparable to that of Autochthonia through the Wyld, and to resist the pressures and environments to be found without. The challenges to come would be immense; but they would survive. They would go on.

The Dawn of the Third Age

First Steps

The years immediately following the Great Evacuation where characterized by great hardship, and great innovation. Obviously, everyone couldn't be simply integrated simply on demand; the world-body that the Titan became was, while not as actively hostile to the inhabitance of humanity as the Realm of Brass and Shadow had been, was still not natively suited to their prosperity. However, this time the Great Dreamer was prepared; as the evacuees who had been pulled up in the collection beams were brought aboard, spirit, elemental and mortal alike, they were met by a swarm of Design Weavers, who promptly encased them in a Chrysalis of Preservation; these crystallized people were then fitted with an artifact cap that relieved the Design Weaver of the commitment to the Charm and taken to one of a number of Metropoli which had been pre-installed in the Great Dreamer's World-Body before the final flight; there, sitting astride the Titan's essence channels in great racks they await, perfectly preserved and draining far fewer resources than they would if they were animate. Those who lived in, and consisted of Denandsor, came back aboard the world-body to find that the world those who still remembered it had changed completely.

The Realm of Brass and Shadow is no more. The Titan that was the Great Maker has become the Great Dreamer; no longer Autochthon, the Great Maker but Bathistophon, the Great Dreamer, whose world-body was the Realm of Dream and Synapse. The Great Dreamer, with the intelligence and memory of Autochthon but freed of Autochthon's diseases, steadily lost the ability to create in the ways that the Great Maker had. Autochthon, and then Bathistophon, were aware of this change taking place, and took measures to ensure that it would pose as little threat to the outgoing refugees as possible: he knew, in both incarnations, that their survival depended on him; and his survival would depend on them. Though individually tiny (barring the Exalted,) it would be the works and labors, the hopes and dreams of mortals, that would be the key to survival.

The first years in the Realm of Dream and Synapse were not easy; infrastructures that had taken millennia to build the first time had to be reconstructed in a hurry, but this time they had the benefit of the Alchemical Exalted, including the Patropoli and Metropoli which had survived the war, but that was not all; they had the irreproachable teamwork of those Terrestrial Exalted who had not descended from the Scarlet Empress amongst them; as well the incomparable might of the Lunar Exalted and the brilliant geniuses of the Solar Exalted, with what few Sidereals remained serving to offer forth their advice and input. The refugees survived; they flew onwards, into the Wyld, and thought that they might have finally left their woes behind them.

The First Boarding

It was in their fifteenth year after the great escape that they were proven wrong. Investigating reports of mortals who were exploring and mapping their strange new world going missing, a team of experienced Terrestrial Exalts also vanished, their communications going silent suddenly. Fearing the worst, a team of experienced Champions was assembled and sent after them, loaded for combat. Their communications, too, went silent, but one of them returned with news of what they had encountered, and it was horrifying: A blasphemous Assembly of a threat which had been believed to be long gone, Gremlin Alchemicals, led by a trio of Abyssal Exalted. The surviving Champion who returned bore the head of a Void-touched Alchemical as proof.

Their response was predictably strong; two full Circles of the Solar Exalted, reinforced by the few surviving Elder Sidereals and an Assembly each of Champions were assembled to hunt down and destroy the interlopers. How they had managed to hide for fifteen years amongst the refugees was not known, but they did succeed in destroying all of the monsters, and tracked down to purge all of the poor inhabitants of Autochthonia which had been infected by them. Perhaps more alarming was that Bathistophon's response to the incident was ominously short; he commended those who had destroyed the invaders and expressed his confidence that they would continue to perform up to such a standard of excellence.

The Games, restored?

As the society within grew, of course, relations strained in places. Although the Incarnae had agreed to leave with the evacuation, they now found themselves somewhat adrift; the plan that all were following was not one of their design, and they were not followers by nature; however, their original functions were by and large obsolete. With Creation no more, Sol Invictus was of course resolved to protecting the people of Creation, all of whom were now to be found inside the World-Body of Bathistophon. However, there was little enough for him to do in this state; Daystar orbited Bathistophon, as did the Silver Chair (though much closer.)

The Incarnae asked Bathistophon to recreate the Games of Divinity, but Bathistophon refused. Though he knew how to construct the Games of Divinity, he was no longer capable of doing so, and the resources it would take simply to recreate the Games themselves would be a tremendous, unacceptable and unjustifiable burden on the survival of all the things sheltering within him. Without Creation to power the Games, they would not function, and Bathistophon again pointed out that, while the Elemental Poles of his World-Body and the people within might be sufficient to power the rebuilt games, that power drain would put their lives at risk.

The Incarnae were not happy with the answer, but they could only realize that Bathistophon's logic was beyond reproach. To recreate the Games would risk the destruction of their purviews and Motivations; Sol Invictus especially could not permit such an idea to be contemplated. Bathistophon did not, of course, reveal his third reason for refusal; it had been the Incarnae's addiction to the Games that had allowed Creation to reach such a state in the first place. Privately, Bathistophon placed as much blame upon his former identity (and hence, himself) for that as he did upon the Incarnae; they shared the guilt for that equally. It had been his lack of foresight that had allowed lesser divinities such as the Incarnae to become hopelessly addicted to the distraction he had forged for his once-kin.

Mortal Affairs

Autochthonian society survived more or less contiguously; while the mortal Autochthonians who had disembarked upon Denandsor with their Alchemical brethren were no longer amongst the living, the children of that generation survived as the elders of the first generation of Autochthonians to dwell aboard the Realm of Dream and Synapse. Most of the Champions remembered the Realm they had come from, even if this new one was alien to them.

The mortals began to break up as their Patropoli and Metropoli spread through the body of the Great Dreamer. They expected to need to work again; were prepared to take up wrench and lever to support Bathistophon, and found themselves utterly confused when very little needed to be done in that regard; though certainly they needed to work, and hard, to establish their living and dwelling spaces.

Old nationalist thoughts remained; though the Great Maker had been quite careful to ensure the intermingling of the mortals during their time as the nation-city that grew around Denandsor, the nature of mortals remained once of divisions - us and them, identity versus identity; even if the identities had changed somewhat with the influx of Creation's people who had joined them. They began to split up, the problem exacerbated in no small part by the Patropoli and Metropoli, for whom the Century of War was but less than a tenth of their memory. It seemed as if the first war would emerge between the nation of Estasia-Lookshy and the confederation which had arisen when the Patropoli of Gulak had accepted within them the peoples of the other members of the River Provinces, primarily coalesced around the peoples of Great Forks and Nexus, which took the name of the Great Convergence.

The war was averted, thankfully, at the negotiation table; many of the Dragon-Blooded survivors of Lookshy remembered being a part of the River Provinces, as did the former God-rulers of Great Forks, and brought the leadership of both nations together to avert the crisis; both nations agreed to move their peoples apart and give them time to settle down. Estasia-Lookshy moved towards the outer hull, whilst the Convergence moved deeper. Both peoples would make fascinating new discoveries; Estasia-Lookshy would discover that now the hull of Autochthonia was accessible, whilst the Great Convergence would be the ones who unraveled the mystery that had confounded the previous explorers: that the topography of Autochthonia was not oriented with a static "down" but rather was oriented like the layers of an onion.

Of course, it was inevitable that tensions would flare, even over something as simple and obvious as the nature of government. Those who were descended from the first Autochthonians took as granted the fact that the Tripartite system of governance which had served them for five millennia would continue unabated; though it should have come to no surprise that this idea was rejected by many, somehow it surprised everyone. The first strains of these conflicts began in Estasia-Lookshy; the former Dragon-Blooded Shoguns became dissatisfied with their nebulous status when a project they launched to erect a war memorial to honor the fallen Terrestrial Exalted who had died in the Great Evacuation was interfered with by a mortal member of the Tripartite who disagreed with the resources the planned memorial would consume.

The outrageous insult to the honor of the Dragon-Blooded Host was dealt with by what was, surprisingly, an amazing amount of civil restraint. Once again the Terrestrial Exalted took to the negotiation table instead of readying daiklaives; they were willing to hear out the objection and consider it, and the finest crafters among them, and even among the Jade Caste Alchemicals sympathetic to their desire, returned to the drawing board to redesign the memorial so as to be as economical as possible without compromising grandiosity. They approached the Tripartite boldly, outlining the details of their alternative suggestions, and were promptly informed that the proceedings taking place were not a negotiation but an announcement; the Tripartite had decreed that all such usage of resources was for now and the foreseeable future an unacceptable use of resources. The Terrestrial Host was outraged, and demanded to bring the matter to a vote; they had significant numbers, of course, and with the number of Champions sympathetic to their cause, knew well that they would have the numbers to force the memorial through.

It was at that point that they were informed that the membership of the Exalted in the Tripartite was strictly honorary, and they had no power to compel the Tripartite to do anything, and their wasteful memorial would never be built as punishment for their impudence. Violence and bloodshed broke out, and by the hour's end the Tripartite's mortal assembly was dead, the four Sworn Brotherhoods which had been in attendance were mostly dead, and six Champions lay dead. Civil unrest broke out with Dragon-Blooded Exalts clashing with Champions in the streets, Warstrider pilots doing battle with Colossi in the vast thoroughfares, and only the rapid descent of Lunar, Solar and Sidereal Exalts upon the nation restored order. The Divine Ministers were horrified and consulted Bathistophon by the day's end, but the Great Dreamer's only instructions were that they were to contain damage; the Exalted of Creation would not be bound such as his Chosen were, and attempting to bind them in such a manner would only result in greater bloodshed. They would have to work such matters out amongst themselves.

In Estasia-Lookshy, order had been restored but not governance. The Terrestrial Exalted pointed to the fact that the Tripartite Assembly had all been slain within moments of conflict erupting as evidence of their unfitness to govern, and wished to establish a Shogunate. This, of course, was unacceptable to the Alchemical Exalted, and they pointed to the fact that the Terrestrials had killed the Tripartite as evidence of their unfitness to govern. The idea of splitting Lookshy and Estasia again was floated; those with loyalty to Lookshy would go and reestablish the Seventh Legion elsewhere in the Great Dreamer, whilst those who wished to remain as Estasia would reestablish their Tripartite. The Patropoli and Metropoli of Estasia remained very ominously silent while their younger and lesser brethren debated the matter, but it was from the Sidereal Exalted that the answer came from; the people of Estasia-Lookshy should, instead of having a bitter fracture immediately, return to the negotiating table to see if a compromise form of government could be reached that would suit their needs.

The Dragon-Blooded Exalted absolutely refused to consider any form of government in which the Exalted were strictly inferior or subordinate to mortal humanity; the Champions pointed to their own actions during the insurrection as being proof of why the Tripartite had been right to fear Exalted tyranny. In the end, they reached a compromise; the Terrestrial Exalted would assume unto themselves the responsibilities of government, however the allocation of resources would remain the sole purview of the mortal members of the Tripartite, who would also retain sole authority over the matters of the Alchemical Exalted. Terrestrials would never be allowed to directly correspond with or speak with those who decided upon the allocation of resources, to prevent the application of magic to the task of swaying their decisions, and those personages would at all times be accompanied by a Champion bodyguard. For determining matters of state policy, Alchemical representatives of the Mortal Tripartite would meet with the Terrestrial Tripartite and vote upon the matter. A Tie would be settled by consulting the Divine Minister in whose purview the problem most closely fit - this last clause took the Ministers by astounded surprise, but they agreed that it would be better to be drawn into the affairs of the states on rare occasion than to risk the compromise the battling parties had agreed upon being scrapped and no further compromise being possible. To themselves, they reasoned, they could always delay answering indefinitely until the parties at odds could sort it out themselves.

It was of course, the beginning of several such radical upsets. The Great Convergence saw the trouble that had befallen Estasia-Lookshy and spontaneously reorganized their own form of government into one that resembles the Estasian-Lookshan model, only it places the mortal tripartite as the administrators of government, and the divinities as the allocators of resources. They did not require the same strict separation of mortal and immortal governors as the people of Estasia-Lookshy did, and ties would be dealt with by consulting the youngest of Alchemicals within the Nation. Some further nations began to rethink their form of governance; Sova, which saw firsthand more clearly than any else the might of the Solar Exalted when they first came to Autochthonia to cleanse the Great Maker, submitted itself directly to the rule of a full circle of Solar God-Kings who had taken up residence within, rather than see any wars erupt or the application of wide-scale social engineering magics to the same end end. Some cynics argue that the decision to do so was, in itself, the result of wide-scale social engineering magic (or at least narrow-scale personal subversion magic,) but for better or worse control of the nation fell into the hands of five Solars in the span of one day, who promptly went about the business of carefully reforming their new nation; those whom this new arrangement dissatisfied were invited to take considerable amounts of supplies with them and depart to form their own nation, though this offer was not taken up.

Internal Affairs

The social upheavals taking place within Autochthonia disturbed Bathistophon and the Divine Ministers, but there was nothing to be done about it. Well aware that if they attempted to act in order to limit or impinge upon the natures of the Exalted they could be destroyed - at the least threatened - they chose to concede that the Exalted had the right to reorganize mortal affairs as they chose, barring only that they did not attempt to infringe upon the mortal affairs of other peoples, simply because a large-scale war breaking out within would endanger the survival of everyone. This implicit agreement was understood by all, and became the unspoken order of the day, as well as the idea that it was better to allow malcontents to depart in peace than to forcibly subjugate them. That question, at least for the time being, was settled; and just in time, for that was when the second boarding occurred.

The first warning sign was when a group of malcontents departing from the Great Convergence, among them a Patropolis who had been packed up for movement, vanished; their scouting party returned to the main encampment to find that all they had left behind had been slaughtered. Justifiably frightened, especially at the apparent theft of the Patropolis Lux, the scouting party returned to the Convergence; scouts went sent out to locate the targets while another strike force was prepared. What they found was horrifying; the Patropolis Lux had apparently been stolen by a team of Abyssal and Apostate Alchemical Exalted; and worse, had been forcibly made into a Gremlin. The scout who made the discovery returned to bring back the strike team, but by the time they arrived, Lux's core was gone, and the Abyssal Exalted. They dealt with the Gremlin Alchemicals, but the mystery of where Lux was absconded to has never been solved.

It was at that time that the new calender was decided upon; the calender of Autochthonia and Creation had always been the same, with the years simply being counted differently. The same basic structure - a year consisting of fifteen months, each of which consisted of twenty-eight days divided into four equal weeks - was retained. The names of the Months were reconciled by using the names of five of Autochthonia's Bathistophonian Elements for the seasons: Coolant, Steam, Crystal, Metal, and Lightning, each of which is divided into three months, being Approaching, Actual, and Departing. The sixth element, Vacuum, it was decided did not necessitate honoring on the calender, though it has since acquired a correlation with the time of Calibration. The calender was agreed upon by all and distributed to all corners on 12 Coolant Actual, in the year 56 Post-Evacuation.

The Fear Years

It was in that inauspicious year that the first Yozi Cult within Autochthonia was uncovered. As a practice, once stability had been ensured, rapid growth had commenced by slowly decrystalizing the sleepers in stasis, to integrate them into Autochthonian society. Among those who had been taken aboard it turned out, were definitely Yozi worshipers; these in particular had been decrystallized six years prior, and it had taken them that long to find one another and establish a cult; however, their efforts bore dire fruit. They managed to call a second-circle soul of Adjoran into the interior of Autochthonia, where it ran loose causing chaos to the infrastructural parts of Bathistophon deep in the unseen regions until it was tracked down and terminated by Destroyer-class defensive spirits; the subsequent inquest rooted out what is believed to be all of the Yozi-worshiping cell, who were promptly interrogated and put to death. Disturbingly, however, not all of those they found to be Yozi worshipers were decrystallized Creation-Born, as three among them were descendants of the Autocthonians.

It would not be the last time; two more Yozi Cults were uncovered in the next ten years, one thankfully before it had the opportunity to do any damage, but the second managed to summon a Sesseljae, which escaped before the cell was destroyed. The demon successfully hid, as the Exalted scratched their heads wondering what such a small demon was hoped to accomplish within Autochthonia. They had their answer three weeks later when a worker who had been exploring towards the Pole of Coolant accidentally tapped a line containing poisonous coolant that had neither color nor odor nor taste and mistook it for water to drink. Dying from his poisoning, the Stomach Bottle Bug told him that not only could he survive his unfortunate but all-too-human mistake, but he could become Exalted by it. The worker took the demon up on it's offer.

It was considered to be the height of auspicious luck by all when the resulting Chrysalis Grotesque was discovered by an unrelated work party and reported promptly. When the newborn Infernal Exalt emerged from his cocoon he was promptly captured, interrogated and executed. What they learned was horrifying.

The Green Sun once again hovered over the lands that had been Creation and Yu-Shan at once the broken lands that had been left behind the evacuees had been transformed into a blasted Hellscape, in large part with no harm done by their scorched earth policy. As Hell expanded out of Malfeas, the Yozis themselves had been freed; the World-City of Malfeas now hovered in the sky above the plane of Malfeas, above the wrecked crater of what once had been the Blessed Isle, and above Yu-Shan as well, while the borders of Hell expanded ever-outwards. They had attempted to breach the Underworld, but had been unsuccessful; it had only been when exploring the Wyld in search of a way to get to the Evacuees that the nature of what had occurred there became known; the Abyssal Exalted continued to be Exalted, and worse, now the armies of the dead were augmented by what seemed to be hundreds, even thousands, of Alchemical Exalts. Hell and the Underworld wage an eternal war upon one another, whilst both Yozis and their void counterparts seek to attack the Evacuees.

To say the least, the news was troubling, and the Incarnae, Bathistophon, and powerful luminaries of all sorts again called a meeting to discuss the situation, taking place aboard the Daystar. This Sun-Lit Concave came to the conclusion that while turning around to do battle with their foes was within their means, it would be a victory they would not enjoy. Instead, the superior victory would be to depart for places they could not be followed, to establish a new home beyond the reach of their hated enemies. The first step in so doing, argued Luna, would be to find Gaia, and entreat her to join them. While Bathistophon held doubts of Gaia's willingness, Luna was adamant that she could persuade the Titan to do so; and revealed then the ultimate status of the Green Mother, who had until then slipped by unnoticed. Gaia's jouten was aboard the Silver Chair, where she had been in a near stupor since the middle of the war, when the Elemental Dragons began to die in the fighting. She constantly mumbled 'out. Further out. Further,' in these dazes, but when she was lucid she was utterly without knowledge of the disposition of the rest of herself, save that she knew she still existed.

It was agreed that they would follow Gaia's trail in their outbound flight, sailing above the Wyld as they were, and that eternal vigilance was the price of survival; they would remain vigilant against threats to Autochthonia and the vessels of the Evacuation Fleet: Of these, the Directional Titan Harmonious Gale had docked above the Pole of Crystal, whose orientation had been declared to define 'up' relative to the fleet, and the Five-Metal Shrike had docked aboard it. Both were maintained fully-staffed and ready to fly at a moment's notice, with a crew that was carefully selected to be as neutral towards politics as possible. These militants owed their loyalty to the world-body, not to the nations within.

The Centuries of Progress

The next few centuries marked progress and adaptation. It was in 101 P.E. that the first greenhouse was erected on the hull of Autochthonia, warmed and lit by the light of the Daystar, surfaced with soil saved Elsewhere, it soon became proof that they could grow their own supplies. Such greenhouses were very quickly erected along the hull; from strictly agricultural growth locations in the shape of bread loaves to the enormous geodesic dome containing the tracts of jungle taken wholesale from Creation. Resources were not scarce during these years; they had vast quantities of most anything they could desire, siphoned from Creation, and when they needed something they didn't have it was simple to send out a Solar on a Wyld-resistant vessel to use Wyld-Shaping Technique to retrieve it. The attacks continued, however; Abyssals and Gremlin Alchemicals would make their way aboard Autochthonia with disturbing regularity, though the frequency was low. Yozi Cults - and, as if that weren't bad enough, the occasional Void cult - showed up as well, despite the tireless efforts of those whose tasks were to stamp out such heresy. However, tensions among the residents remained surprisingly low; the leaderships of all the disparate peoples had adopted an unofficial policy of not interfering with one another, and seeking mediation and arbitration rather than remedy by violence when agendas clashed. Though human nature remained unchanged, everyone was literally in the same ship, and aware of that fact. It was in 250 P.E. that the first Metropolis to be ascended during the new age ascended; and rather than becoming yet another city aboard Autochthonia, she ascended to Metropolis status in a great bay which was open to the hull of Autochthonia, and her people began tirelessly working to construct her Municipal Charms. Within five years the initial plans she had laid down were completed, installed, tested and buttoned up; Guiding Light of Hope, an Adamant-Caste Metropolis, fired up a vast Municipal-sized Plasma Thruster Assembly and took flight under her own power, thrusting free of Autochthonia's gravity and Wyld-repulsion fields.

The flight was anything but a disaster. Several Twilight Caste Solar Exalted had been consulted heavily on the design of the Charms that would be installed and activated to keep Guiding Light intact, and borrowed heavily on their own native ability to repel the Wyld in the form of Chaos-Repelling Prana and Integrity-Protecting Prana, and an Eclipse-Caste Captain stood ready at the helm to claim emergency command and use his own Charms to preserve the ship should something go wrong.

Nothing went wrong. Guiding Hope was the first to prove it could be done; the bravery that she and those within her evidenced would be exemplified by many in later generations; they were the first of the Anarchronauts.

The Centuries of Progress were not without their challenges, of course. Flying further into the Wyld, they came under attack by creatures of the Wyld; though unimaginably vast behemoths attempted at first to attack, and were swiftly beaten back by the unfettered might of the Daystar, or reduced to calcified ash by the world-scouring power of the Sword of Autochthonia, the inhabitants of Autochthonia realized to their sorrow that they could be directly attacked by that which lay without (which were not the mysterious boarding of the Abyssal Exalted or the unfortunate incident in which an Infernal managed to Exalt within) some time after the launch of Guiding Light. A swarm of Fae, unimaginable in numbers and size, attacked the fleet; those that attempted to touch Daystar were burnt to a crisp, and those which landed on the Silver Chair were quickly enslaved by Luna and turned against their brethren, but Autochthonia had no wide-scale unified defense against such swarms and neither the cannonfire of the Daystar nor the Sword could kill them all. Defensive shields quickly slammed down in place over the already-tough Adamant windows of the greenhouses, but the Fae landing in untold numbers quickly began to pry open hatches, boarded through the launch bays around Autochthonia's equatorial trench, and otherwise make nuisances of themselves. Internal defenders rallied to battle, and within Autochthonia and on it's surface they had the advantage in that Shaping powers were nearly completely disabled, but still hundreds of thousands died; in the end the wave of Fair Folk were repulsed. Guiding Light herself did not come under attack, as there was an Eclipse-Caste Captain aboard her at the time, and the ancient oaths sworn in the name of all fair folk bound the fae from attacking the young city-ship.

The battles lasted a bloody, brutal week until the Fae were called off; Sunshadow, the Eclipse-Caste nominal captain aboard Guiding Light of Hope, had managed to find and bring what amounted to leadership of the Fae swarm attacking them to the table, and negotiated terms for their passage; terms which essentially amounted to 'call off your minions and stop attacking us or we'll annihilate you'. The Fair Folk found his argument compelling and his terms irrefusable.

The Years of Passage

Thus was the state of affairs for the next thousand years; slowly more vessels set out into the void; Alchemical city-ships premier amongst these but not exclusively so. Small vessels were made, extensions of the designs of the Shaft Speeders and Skiffs and other vehicles which were mass-produced to enable swift navigation, but their purpose was not within but without; hardened against the Wyld, these vessels were produced to allow Autochthonia's denizens to take flight and unleash violence against their enemies should they be swarmed again; the smallest of them large enough for only a single man, and the largest capable of holding dozens of crew. Time and again the scenarios would play out; moving from one fae court to another, the path of Autochthon out into infinite Wyld would pass them from one Faerie's court to another, and once again an Eclipse Caste would be sent out to secure passage; often they traded for something simple, such as a promise that they would cease the use of Wyld-Shaping Technique whilst passing through a realm, or that they would send a storyteller to engage in Shaping battles with the faerie lords for entertainment. Sometimes they were forced to resort to the threat of violence (for those Eclipses which were given this task preferred to negotiate in peace before resorting to threats,) and twice actual war was the only option; the Evacuees took to such battles with a sense of grim resignation.

The Speck of Gaia

It was in the month of Departing Coolant of the year 991 P.E. when the first trace of Gaia's passage was discovered. By agreement with the local Fae of the second prior realm the evacuees had traversed, they were required to travel high above the plane of like-ground which had extended out from Creation, and found that arrangement - flying so high that the like-ground wasn't in sight - suited them just fine and they saw no reason to descend. From their lofty vantage point the could see nothing of the like-ground below through the silver and gray clouds and fogs that floated below, so when the forward scouts flying far before Guiding Light of Hope saw a circle of light emanating from the like-ground below, and naturally curious, dispatched the fastest craft in the fleet which could be dispatched - the Five-Metal Shrike - to investigate.

What they found was astounding - a verdant green hill which to their sensors was clearly a zone warded against Wyld influence, with a single growing tree within, and a number of strange and beautiful creatures within; they had bodies like like a large doe with dappled markings, but instead of a deer's head they sprouted the waist of a lissome woman with four-fingered arms of exceptionally long grace and fluidity, featuring faces that were nearly triangular and achingly beautiful, and long, rounded, soft-furred ears.

They were also quite terrified by the Fae which had been pushing the borders of their bubble of safety ever-inwards. Though they were beautiful and strange enough to have been Wyld-Born, the Solars who discovered them determined that they most certainly had not come from the Wyld, and a vessel was dispatched to collect the population, which numbered less than thirty, as well as their tree of stability, which was a beautiful, glowing orchid tree. Returned to Autochthonia, Bathistophon immediately ascertained their nature; they were examples of the Hymn, first-circle Kami of his departed sister, Gaia.

Luna, of course, immediately raced to speak with them, but epochs of fear had eroded their memory; all they could tell the Mercurial Lady was that their progenitor had continued onwards, deeper into the Wyld. Navigating the Wyld being tricky, they nevertheless ascertained the 'direction' she had gone in and adjusted course to follow, after using the Shrike's weapons to obliterate all traces of the Hymn's colony, and so hoped to throw off their pursuit. They continued onwards.

The Great Wall of Chaos

It was in the year 1167 P.E. when the first reports of a Great Wall began to be reported by the farthest-outlying scouts; their sensors would, all at once, report what seemed to be an all-encompassing wall of Chaos so intense that it was opaque, but as they drew near it retreated suddenly, before it could be sighted by any means save the farthest-ranged navigation sensors; defying all attempts to use any sort of pursuit magic to catch it.

This phenomena was rather understandably found to be highly perturbing to all who witnessed it, not in the least because it began to reoccur, again and again and again. Once could have been dismissed as a fluke of the Wyld, a faulty reading, even a sensor operation botch. The same phenomena being reported by a vast number of city-ships, on the other hand, was another matter altogether. It continued to reoccur, over and over again for several hundred years, until the point when the phenomena had become almost routine; during that time there were three incursions of Gremlin Alchemicals and Abyssals, two Yozi Cults were rooted out and destroyed, and short series of skirmishes between Estasia-Lookshy and the Great Convergence happened over a border dispute of equatorial trench territory. The Great Wall of Chaos began to simply be a matter of routine, occurring at least once a month.

That all changed in the year 1590 P.E. This time, the Chaos Wall didn't move - in fact, the Autochthonians had become so complacent to it's existence and the inevitability of it's moving out of the way that the scout at the leading edge of the fleet, the young Anarchronaut Anointed by Brilliant Sunlight, an Oricalcum-Caste Metropolis whose previous incarnation was as a Night-Caste Solar whose life had begun as a Day-Caste Abyssal renegade who had thrown her lot in with the Evacuees, failed even to decelerate before flying bow-first into the wall and promptly vanishing.

The fleet, for the first time in over one and a half millennia of flight, came to a halt. Mortals within Autochthonia, nearly all of whom (barring recently-decrystallized Creation-Born) had lived their entire lives with the steady, subconscious sensation of the world-body's outwards flight, began to panic at the palpable change in the sensation of life. As the cooler heads within preached calm and order, scouts approached the Great Wall of Chaos, bombarding it with sensors and hailing calls. The probing of the Great Wall continued for nearly a year, and through Calibration, into the early days of Coolant Actual, when the first more vigorous probing was attempted; they shot it with an essence cannon, then an implosion bow, then they ramped up all the way to a Mk IV Heavy Sonic Cannon. When that, too, left the Great Wall both unfazed, apparently unchanged and still uncommunicative, the Five-Metal Shrike came in and unleashed a half-kilomote attack from the Godspear of the Five-Metal Shrike.

They finally got a response; the city-ship Anarchronaut Anointed by Brilliant Sunlight was ejected from the great wall, apparently adrift, and apparently having taken the direct hit from the Shrike; the great Metropolis sheared into two pieces, evidently unable to defend itself from the attack; the mortified crew of the Shrike were the first to board, followed by the scrambled rescue vessel, which quickly held the stricken vessel safely in his Municipal-sized Paramagnetic Tether Beam as fearless emergency technicians crossed the gap in small vessels.

All who had not died in the blast were found to be comatose; the commanding officer, by tradition on the forward running vessel an Eclipse-Caste captain who used his Anima power to negotiate with any new powers discovered, was not to be found. For days the debate raged aboard the Daystar; many advocated for an immediate bombardment of the Wall by the mightiest weapons at the fleet's disposal, but surprisingly it was Ignis Divine who stated the nature of the phenomena before them was unknown; whether it be Primordial, Shinma, Unshaped, or other; whether even it was a discrete foe to attack or simply a feature of the Wyldscape was not even known, and it would be as vaingloriously foolish to attack it as to believe one was demonstrating valor by smacking a mountain with a stick.

Though Sol naturally declared that he would probe the Wall himself, he was talked out of it by an Oricalcum-caste Alchemical, wise beyond his Essence enlightenment, who successfully argued that if their hailing calls were not penetrating the wall, then a monstrous foe could take advantage of his absence to attack the fleet. Instead, the job was given to another Eclipse-Caste Anarchronaut and his mixed circle of allies; they would deploy in the sturdiest small vessels amongst the fleet, one they had used time and again in forays to the fog at the bottom of the Wyld. For months the finest crafters amongst the Evacuees toiled, using theories and hypotheses explained to them by the Great Dreamer, designing new communications systems, new sensors, and new anti-Wyld defenses.

Every precaution was taken; every City-Ship was deployed with their defensive Charms operating on full power, all of their sensors locked onto the scout vessel. The Scout itself proceeded forward, bombarding the previously-unreadable wall with a coruscating grid of sensor energy from the brand-new Omnimodal Penetrating Sensor Array, beaming it's findings back to all the other vessels in the Evacuee Fleet with the music of it's new Clarion Caller Array. The sensor findings revealed little that was not known, save that the observed wall appeared to be at once an infinitely thin, infinitely dense shell, and an infinitely vast expanse.

In full knowledge of what they were doing, the scout vessel accelerated slowly into the wall, vanishing as they slipped into it. The clear and beautiful machine call of the Clarion Caller Array warped, becoming harshly mechanical and filled with static and noise; the language it returned seemed to have shifted, modulating in strange and horrible melodies; no longer intelligible to the Evacuees, those with suitably Charms immediately attempted to decipher the information being returned, but it resisted all efforts. When the Exaltations of the four Celestial Exalted aboard the scout and the missing captain of Anarchronaut Anointed by Brilliant Sunlight suddenly reappeared in Lytek's cabinet in his office aboard the Daystar, everyone capable of nervousness gave themselves to it, whilst everyone not capable of nervousness advocated for caution or retribution. Then the scout returned; scorched, pocked, and sizzled as if it had been through a thousand battles and flown close to a thousand alien suns, it floated adrift as Brilliant Sunlight had before; it was retrieved and explored. Within they found the lifeless husk of the Alchemical member of the circle who had boarded the vessel, having committed suicide by plucking his soulgem from his forehead. The others appeared to have died of age, at separate times; when the Soulgems were returned and analyzed, it became clear what had occurred; the small Scout had entered a realm of infinity in all directions, and had tried in vain to return home. They had participated in a great many adventures with strange and bizarre, in some cases maddening-to-behold creatures. Eventually, one by one, the Exalted died of age, until only the immortal Alchemical was left; he then, many centuries of activity later, attracted the attention of a being known as The Allmind, who informed them that he and his friends, including the captain of the original vessel, had embedded themselves in him, and that the world that he was was being held together by his Exaltation being active. The only way to return home, to inform those he had left behind of what had transpired, was to die.

The Alchemical had pulled out his Soulgem safe in the knowledge that it would be recovered, and the memories within would be located. When these memories were viewed, anger was the result; only Bathistophon cautioned in favor of a measured response, but the others viewed what had happened as a direct attack upon them.

Bathistophon reluctantly agreed to go along with the plan of attack, and prepared for battle. The assembled fleet moved into battle formation, as mighty cannons were loaded; the fleet struck at once, with the hurling of the Godspear of All-Searing Noon from astride the Daystar being the signal to fire. Dirigible Engine Daystar's cannons were all fired at once; the Sword of Autochthonia's six composite beams met and unleashed world-cracking energies at a level of intensity that was beyond even that used to scorch Creation; the Five-Metal Shrike unleashed it's Godspear, the Titan Harmonious Gale unleashed it's mile-wide Solar lens, Colossi and Metropoli and Celestial Exalted of all stripes in vessels great and mighty, nimble and well-armed unleashed havoc of all stripes, all at one spot before them.

For the first time, the Wall of Chaos reacted; the damage flowing into it spread into a vast series of colored cracks fracturing along it, and light spilled out. As the barrage's initial firing cooled down, the cracks began to dim.

Then the retaliation came. Intense in it's ferocity and overwhelming in it's power, the return fire was incredible beyond compare; though it could not pierce perfect defenses (as they were, by definition, perfect,) those wielding them were seldom so perfect, nor were they possessed of the seemingly infinite reserves of Essence that the attacking wall seemed to have; one-by-one each ship's defenses failed as it's Metropoli or Patropoli, then it's defenders, started to fail in their efforts to maintain the essence reserves required to resist the sustained, furious assault; though the fleet returned fire as best as it was able, only Autochthonia and the Daystar were still capable of putting up any stern resistance whatsoever, as all other vessels put their all into resisting the counter-attack.

The most miraculous thing to occur, however, was the number of friendly casualties; they numbered precisely zero, with the barrage of coruscating, deadly light coming from the Wall tapering off as the defender's defenses ran dry, inflicting precisely enough damage, and in the most precise way possible, to disable the ships without harming them permanently, or harming those within. The only three vessels which were targeted and survived the onslaught were Autochthonia, as the world-body of the Titan had seemingly as limitless essence reserves as the attacker; the Five-Metal Shrike, whose ability to invoke it's Aegis of the Unconquered Sun and the Grasp of the Maidens' simultaneously ensure it's indefinite survival under the harshest of sustained attacks, and the Daystar itself, which was furiously defended by Sol Invictus personally interposing himself and the Aegis of Unconquerable Might between it and incoming fire.

When the return fire slacked off, a face had formed in the fractured middle where the fleet had attacked; a blank, humanoid masque of generic features with a slit for a mouth. The Evacuees then heard it's call, in the machine language that their Scout had sung.

"I see that you are mighty. Know that I am the Allmind, and that I too am mighty. Why do you attack me from within?"

What followed were thirty-two hours of tense negotiation, beginning on 7 Departing Crystal 1591 P.E. The scope of the being they had encountered seemed to be as huge compared to Autochthonia's world-body as Autochthonia itself was to the average cockroach within. Whether or not it was a Primordial as they recognized it, it's initial assault had certainly convinced all of the need to consider all options before resorting to valor; their mightiest barrage, which would surely have sufficed to annihilate a Primordial's world-body, had not seemed to meaningfully harm it, while the restraint it showed in failing to destroy the vulnerable City-Ships had proven that the Allmind was not inclined to simply attempt to squish them as a mortal man might squish a roach beneath his boot.

The turning point was when they ascertained from the Allmind that some time ago, another being had come this way, on a shining silvery comet; the being had sung for an age until he had taken notice, and she had requested passage; not into it, which it would have found very uncomfortable (as it had found the incursion of the scouts,) but through it, from one side to the other.

Allmind knew little of the 'realm' beyond it, if that was a viable word for it, but it knew that the realm existed, posed no known threat to it, and that it was within it's power to send them to the other side. It agreed to do so on the condition that they not turn their weapons upon it again, but it would not agree to the condition of barring passage to their chasing enemies; their affairs were not it's, after all, and it's affairs were not theirs; it did not expect to drag them into it's conflicts and it's problems, nor would it be dragged into theirs.

The Evacuees agreed to the condition, and Allmind gave them time to fully repair themselves of the damage that their battle had caused. When the Fleet was ready, they sent the signal, and a vast blue portal appeared before them, swallowing the Fleet completely and shutting behind them; from their perspective they wound up traveling through a tunnel of intense color and energy, and were deposited without difficulty on the far side; looking back, there was no sign of the Great Wall of Chaos, and looking forward was a realm unlike any that anyone in the evacuation fleet had ever conceived of. Bathistophon remarked, in one of the rare few times that he addressed everyone, from the lowliest sapient god to Ignis Divine himself in one breath, with one message, "this is not the end of our journey, nor is it the beginning. This is but the end of the beginning."

The Eternal Emptiness and the First Interstellar War

First Days

Wherever they were, they were not in the Wyld. Everyone sensed it immediately; this realm seemed to be as stable as the heart of Creation, if it could be called a realm. It was neither solid nor gaseous, nor liquid. It defied description, save that it was akin to Autochthon's Pole of Vacuum; there was nothing in their immediate vicinity, nothing that could be seen; no cloudy fog deep 'below' the pole of Vacuum, no expanse of endless dreams and feuding Unshaped warring at each other with stories. As far as the eye could see in all directions there was nothing; except that which could be seen in the absolute distance, a sight that rent the hearts of the five Maidens, of Luna, and every member of the Fivescore Fellowship: Stars.

In all directions, they were surrounded by the twinkling lights of countless beautiful stars, and the population of Autochthonia that could possibly make the journey to the hull to see did so; hundreds of thousands of pilgrims came together in quiet awe, in Adamant-enclosed greenhouses, parks, fields and even jungles to gaze up, down, all around; those who had been small felt utterly insignificant, and even those who were mighty quieted in contemplation of the vast emptiness surrounding them.

Had they reached and then gone past the edge of the Wyld, or had something stranger happened to them? No-one knew, but what they did know was that there was no going back; no sign of the Allmind existed in this place they found themselves. They were alone, and they had to keep moving; but even moving in this place was unusual; the irresistible pull of the force that all had known since the beginning of time, the pull of gravity, was gone; the only source of gravitational pull were Autochthonia, the Daystar and the Silver Chair. When the world-ships began to move, they discovered to their horror that there was nothing to stop that movement save their own powers; confused, they wound up tethered to one another by Paramagnetic Attraction Beams, and carefully were drawn back into the hull of Autochthonia for refit. This suited their crews, who were in near-complete disarray at the sudden state of weightlessness they found themselves experiencing. Only Guiding Light of Hope remained without, for she had grown too large to fit in even the largest of bays; the majority of her crew were shuttled carefully back to Autochthonia, and those who remained - brave, possibly foolhardy mortals and Exalts who found the weightlessness exhilarating, began exploring the possibility of installing a Charm to produce artificial gravity within, to hold the crew to the deck.

They also discovered that they had traded one form of external inimical environment for another; instead of the warping Wyld, now there was no air. Fortunately, the pole of Vacuum had given the Autochthonians sixteen hundred years of experience dealing with a lack of air, and they could adjust, could adapt. They would adapt. They would survive, and they would find a new home.

The Journey Renewed

For a tense year they lingered where they had been deposited; with Autochthonia as the only point of reference and the idea of getting so far away from him that the way back could not be found to be terrifying, few wished to risk exploring. Navigating in this realm was a difficult task, made all the more difficult when Bathistophon's only answer to requests that he assist them was that he was devoting all of his discretionary pondering time to a matter of even greater importance. The City-Ships were refit simply; it was but the task of constructing and installing a sub-module of Plasma Thruster Assembly, utilizing the awesome and perpetual power of the city-sized engines to power a Gravitational Simulator Array.

The task of figuring out how to navigate was more difficult; there were two schools of thought. Most of the Solar and Alchemical Exalted believed the answer was is constructing a beacon of some sort that would invariably point the way to Autochthonia and other vessels, while the Maidens, Sidereals, Lunars, and odd Terrestrials who had interest in navigation believed that they had all the reference points they needed in the stars, and had merely to study them.

Both plans were enacted simultaneously; correlating data taken from the points on Autochthon's hull above his six poles, from the Maiden's towers on the Silver Chair, from the outlying scouts and mobile observations taken from Harmonious Gale, the Five-Metal Shrike and other vessels, the monumental undertaking of developing a comprehensive astrological chart was completed within the year. In approximately the same timeframe the beacon project was completed. The Lighthouse of Eternity was completed and installed on the hull of Autochthona, a vast and glittering, blinking array of spires and antennae emerging from the equatorial trench in the direction that had traditionally been favored as 'forward'; above the Pole of Lightning, forty-five degrees to the left of the great recess in which the Sword of Autochthonia, once the Sword of Creation, was installed.

It was during this year that the leadership within came to a saddening realization: Wyld-Shaping Technique was no longer working, which meant that the infinite resources the Wyld had once offered were no longer available. They had vast reserves thanks to having stripped Creation before they left, and having provisioned even moreso in the Wyld, and now it seemed that that foresight was vital; they had more than sufficient resources stockpiled, but they would have to begin rationing until a means of resupply was discovered.

As the combined fleet made it's first halting movements forward into the unknown, the attentions of those within turned to recycling and methods of resupply, while Autochthon remained ominously silent. Nevertheless, an atmosphere of quiet optimism pervaded; the people knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that their collective labors, those of all their ancestors, had resulted in the impossible being achieved; spirits were buoyant, even as the first recycling and rationing measures came into effect.

The Slow Years

The astronavigators, having conducted extensive studies of the stars, reached a conclusion after ten years of travel; their path would take them close to a star. In the realm they now inhabited, a realm without anything to inhibit momentum, they would have to be careful; without a reference point for "stopped" it was impossible to use a magic that brought one to a halt, and they tirelessly worked towards establishing such a reference point; it also meant that traveling towards the star that their path would take them would have to be a careful activity; they would have to accelerate towards it for most of their journey, and then, awkwardly, turn around and accelerate away from it at the same rate, so that they would come to a close frame of reference with it such that they could see what it was. The journey was calculated to take five centuries, and so it did.

It was, for once, five centuries free of boarding by Abyssals and Gremlins, and only three Yozi cults sprung up in those years; though unfortunately there was a year of chaos when a Yozi Cult managed to nearly subvert a whole city-ship by causing three Infernal Exalted to be Exalted aboard, and the battles cost the lives of hundred of loyal crew, the core of the Metropolis survived, although she was damaged and needed repair.

The year of Infernal Mutiny aside, things went slowly; population control measures were enacted, the decrystallization of the sleepers slacked off and was halted entirely, and for the most part, the Evacuees knew peace.

It was also a time of cultural advancement. With the lack of excitement coming from the occasional attack by fair folk or tense negotiation, the people needed an outlet for their energy; while Bathistophon needed maintenance, it was nowhere near the unceasing attention which Autochthon had required. With the heavy consumption of resources which were easily replenished in the Wyld curtailed, new means of channeling the public energy were needed; means which relied on renewable resources. Some societies sought the answer in enlightenment, launching vast educational programs that went far beyond the high standard of education which most Autochthonians possessed, while others sought it in diversion and drill: Estasia-Lookshy, for instance, ramped up their culture of public service by performing ever-more-frequent drills of the Populat, in everything from emergency containment procedures to militia activities; they were also the ones responsible for making competitive team sports from a local diversion to a national passion, which would eventually grow to encompass multinational competitions. The Great Convergence turned to increasing prayer outputs, while championing resource-light forms of hedonism for entertainment.

The Sickly Sun

Having expected to find that the star they approached was a luminous jewel of Starmetal, the Evacuees were surprised to learn, on 18 Approaching Metal, 1911 P.E., that the star they were journeying towards was in fact a sun! This nigh-heretical fact surprisingly did not enrage Sol Invictus; for though there were other suns, he was the Unconquered Sun, the greatest of them all. More amazing, however, was the revelation of objects rotating around the pale green star they approached, which had been dubbed the Sickly Sun. They arrived closely enough to feel the gravitational pull of the star, which was tremendous, by the year 2051 P.E., and they reached the first of it's orbiting objects in 2100 P.E.

To say that the information coming back from forward scout, a city-ship by the name of Traveller of a Thousand Voyages, surprised everyone when he reached the first such object would be an understatement. It was an utterly uninhabitable ball of unremarkable rock, and very remarkable ice; when a sample was melted to the average temperature within Autocthonian city-ships it went straight through a liquid phase and into a poisonous gas which was found to be similar in composition to that emitted from the posterior end of bovine; this naturally led to the bizarre experiment of bovine by-product gasses being contained, isolated, and frozen to confirm that yes, it was the same material. This unusual and frankly puerile revelation fueled endless immature debate amongst the assorted Populat and other populations within the Great Dreamer, and onwards they flew. Within five years the astrologers had cataloged hundreds of objects caught in the attraction of the Sickly Sun, but only a relative handful of them appeared to be remarkable; the vast majority apparently orphaned balls of ice and unremarkable rock. The inner handful, though, were interesting; the farthest remarkable object was a massive sphere of storm and wind, a violently magenta ball of swirling gas; beyond it was small, barren rock that cast a mud-colored hue, a sphere that seemed to be verdant, and a mechanical object the size of a city-ship, floating in close orbit to the Sickly Sun.

The worlds were comparable in size to Autochthonia, though seemingly far more solid and of considerably more mass. The world-body of the Titan carefully inserted itself into the orbit of the star, bringing it's own orbitals with it, and dispatched city-ships to the significant objects on their way in. Anarchronaut Anointed by Brilliant Sunlight was dispatched to the giant ball of gas, Traveller of a Thousand Voyages continued inwards to the mud-colored dead rock, Harmonious Gale and the young Song of Dark Places were dispatched to the verdant world, while Guiding Light of Hope was sent in closest, towards the metallic, shining object.

The ball of storm, reported Anarchronaut Anointed by Brilliant Sunlight, was fascinating, but not especially useful; it was a ball of unbreathable gasses with high electrical charges. Some of the gasses had moderate potential to be harvested, but all in all it was an unremarkable finding. The mud-colored ball which Traveller of a Thousand Voyages descended to was little better; though it was ascertained to be reasonably rich in mundane metals, it was unbreathable and had no discernible signs of habitation, mortal, divine, or other. The same could not be said for the planet: though it's atmosphere was unbreathable, remarkably it was inhabited and possessed of growing life on the surface; strange and bizarre growing life. Purple and brown were the most abundant colors, the plants seemed to be primitive and base, primarily low-to-the-ground broad leafy things, with little in the way of trunks or stems. The creatures in residence seemed to be primarily reptilian, but base and unlike the Dragon Kings of Creation; short, squat, toothy creatures lashing sharpened rocks to the ends of sticks for primitive spears. The use of Charms to question them provided the Evacuees with lots of information about the local mythology, however; calling up the local deities for interrogation proved more fruitful: Once, the locals had possessed a glowing civilization of plant-based magic, ruled by a divinity who had no name but was obviously the incarnation of the star around which the world spun. Though autocratic, he was not tyrannical, and they lived relatively happy lives of worship and service in a divine hierarchy in which the local equivalent of mortals - the tall, glorious ancestors of the short toothy lizards - were at the bottom.

Seven millennia prior to the arrival of the Evacuees, their space had been invaded, proving that they were wrong in believing themselves the only things alive in the cosmos. The alien beings had demanded tribute and tithe of worship, demands which the local sun had refused, rather violently. In retaliation he was subdued and chained, and the surface of the world bombarded; resistance crushed, and the invaders forcibly altered the locals into the forms they bore to that day. An age later, a silver comet had passed over, and from it's surface they heard the song of a beautiful woman - they cried out to her, and the comet had come by; in her grace and benevolence, she had restored they who knew themselves only as The Green, had freed their over-deity from his bondage, and restored their world to life again. In their gratitude, they gave her the one thing that the invaders had lost in the battle and believed destroyed forever; one of the star-cores they used to leap vast distance across the cosmos, from star to star.

The lady had departed, but not long after, the invaders had returned, having noticed the freedom of the local god. In their furious anger they bombarded the world again, enslaved him again and flattened the world yet again. This time they also changed the local gods, binding them from calling out to anyone else for aid, binding servility and quiescence into their natures. They related the story with dispassion, as if being brutally subjugated and enslaved was of no more importance than the local weather. The explorers returned to their ship, and turned their communications arrays back towards the orbiting home of the evacuees, placidly circling the green sun of the system; they held the longest-ranged conference in all of the history of the Creation-Born, reporting in on the situation that they uncovered on the living world, to the grim and dark contemplation of the Unconquered Sun, the rest of the Incarnae and Ku, appointed by the rest Divine Ministers to sit on this meeting and advise. It was clear that whatever strange realm they had entered, it was not entirely a friendly and benign one; then they received the report from Guiding Light of Hope.

At the Sickly Sun, Guiding Light of Hope had found the object to be a purple framework of some kind of obviously magical material; two roughly triangular frames of purple, the inner connected to the outer frame by a single spar to one side. Irregular, it floated through the emptiness, with a brilliant purple light illuminating the span between the tip of the inner and outer triangle; this was revealed to them in real-time as the massive city-ship approached, extending sensor arrays far from it's hull to get magnificent details.

It was Sol who first noticed that it was not two inner triangles but indeed one closed-wing shape, with the forward tips so closely pushed together that they appeared almost to touch - this being but an artifact of distance, and as the sensor array compensated for the brilliant light of the sickly sun in the background, they realized that the distance between the two tips was vast, and emanating a purple light; within which was trapped a form, an indistinct creature, like a sphere but with eight arms. Adjusting for the color, they revealed that the trapped creature was akin to the green sun it orbited, and it was writhing as if in pain.

Everyone in attendance instinctively turned their heads (or hologrammatic representation, or image-in-the-mirror) to Sol Incarnate, looking to the Unconquered Sun for guidance. Grimly, he stated that he would commune with this alien sun-god, and ordered everyone to prepare for anything.

There was no question or debate of the matter, and Sol departed immediately aboard Chirmirajen, entrusting the faithful Daystar with remaining in orbit of Autochthonia where it had been for over two thousand years, warming and lighting that world-body. Those around the verdant world continued to scan it; during Sol's transit, they uncovered evidence of many deposits of magically-resonating materials that seemed to share properties in common with the Magical Materials known to them; they dispatched explorers to gather samples, as the fleet girded for what might be war. Three more city-ships were dispatched, having been specially fit for the rapid harvesting of materials over the past years; once to the mud-colored world, and two to the verdant world.

Everyone tensely observed from afar as the Sun met the Sickly Sun, Chirmirajen pulling up to it's prison and Sol floating out towards it; they met. For a tense several hours they seemed to communicate, though how was beyond the ken of those observing, let alone the contents of their dialogue. Finally, everyone let out a collective gasp as Sol raised the Godspear of All-Searing Noon and thrust it through the purple imprisonment field, into the self-body of the god of the Sickly Sun.

The stricken green star's god writhed immediately, and exploded in a burst of golden light from within; his prison fractured dramatically, tumbling towards the surface of the star it orbited. Everyone who was able to observe stood in shock for moments, and then sounded a general call to arms; all battle-stations were manned, all ships held in reserve were launched whilst the pilots of the single-man defensive craft stood by ready to board their vehicles. Those who were harvesting resources redoubled their efforts to fill their holds and return as fast as possible, while those who had been scanning targets of opportunity turned towards Autochthonia and burnt hard for it.

Tensely, the fleet waited, as everyone returned, and questions were raised as to whether they should continue their journey immediately; it was finally Bathistophon who broke the questions, announcing to his ministers that his long contemplations were complete; having analyzed in every detail the strange phenomena which brought them to their new realm, he had completed the theory of means by which the Allmind had ejected them from the Wyld and into this strange place; the most brilliant Exalted minds immediately began plans to implement the theory as both Municipal Charms and refits to the purely artifice vessels which the fleet contained.

Their haste and caution was warranted. The only explanation Sol ever gave for his actions was that the stricken god had begged him for death.

The First Interstellar War Begins

1 Lightning Actual, 2101 P.E., was the day when the Evacuees met the beings who dared to hold a sun in bondage. They arrived riding a comet-like stream of yellow energy, dropping out of their mode of rapid transportation close to the station where their prison had once kept, saw the last few fragments erratically spinning off into the void, and heard the messages the Evacuees beamed towards one another.

They came in a large fleet of vessels, the largest of them the size of Guiding Light of Hope, by far the largest emptiness-sailing Metropolis, though most smaller. Through means unknown they coordinated with each other, and turned towards the three Metropoli which were returning under escort from the verdant world with their last intended load of materials; they sent two small vessels, the size of the Autochthonian's one-man craft out to probe their defenses; when they opened fire, the Patropolis Stern Whip of Industry responded in kind, swatting them from the emptiness in a hail of wrecked metal. Song of Dark Places and Diligent Engine of Artifice were similarly swift in their retaliation - the crew of Harmonious Gale didn't even wait, simply swatting their probing units from the sky before they could open fire.

The unknown beings seemed to show caution for a time, as the ships returning to the fleet poured all into their forward engines, trusting in the Paramagnetic Attraction Beams of their brethren to arrest their hurried return; that was when the attack began in earnest; a seemingly limitless stream of small vessels began to pour forth from the most massive of the enemy vessels, while the larger enemy vessels moved in towards the quartet of vessels. Fortunately they were not without defenses; the hangars aboard Harmonious Gale, forged well over an epoch ago to hold skyships now disgorged small vessels to defend them, and battle was hurriedly joined; a swirling maelstrom erupted the likes of which had not been seen in nearly a millennia, essence-fueled cannons lancing dire energies out into the eternal emptiness, met with fel return fire in the form of purple lances that rent the valiant fighters inside out, while the attack vessels approached to open fire upon the returning Metropoli, which responded with predictably furious vengeance.

The battle raged for over an hour, and though the strange alien being's defenses were strong, their ships fell to the temper of the Exalted; but they were not without temper of their own. Diligent Engine of Artifice was destroyed with all hands when some kind of horrible bomb - delivered, horrifyingly enough, by a target that had registered as no more than one of the hundreds of fighter-sized vessels - had ripped him to shreds and scattered all the contents within his hull into random configurations, fracturing his Core in the process, while Stern Whip of Industry and Harmonious Gale came out of the battle badly damaged. Song of Dark Places survived relatively unscathed, and fired the shots which destroyed the last of the invader's attacking ships, leaving only a quintet of their largest vessels around the single largest. Those five turned around, generated some kind of sucking energy field before their bows, and vanished, evading the parting shots that Song of Dark Places managed to get off towards them.

In the aftermath, the stunned and furious Evacuees picked up the pieces; the wreckage of Diligent Engine of Artifice was recovered, and meticulously disassembled, piece by piece, whilst small automaton vessels scoured the wreckage field, recovering everything that could be recovered, but most especially the Soulgems of the fallen fighters. The battle's records were analyzed from every available angle, in every spectrum available, and subjected to every analytical Charm at the disposal of the Fleet's assorted Exalted, divinities and Incarnae. Bathistophon remained ominously silent, only stating that he was pondering something that needed to be pondered, and that his full confidence was with them.

The determination was made, eventually, that the beings which had attacked them (dubbed the Slavers) were using some form of attack which was akin to Shaping, but both more primitive and different enough that base Shaping defenses were ineffective. However, as it was a form of direct, physical damage, standard means of defending oneself against damage were effective. This unknown, crude form of attack was dubbed Warp, as it seemed to inflict damage by causing the space and objects it interacted with to shear and stretch violently. With samples of the Slavers' vessels being analyzed, it was predicted that it would be possibly to reverse engineer the technology and develop both targeted defenses against it, and means to employ it for themselves, within a few weeks. However, the larger question which remained could not be answered by ripping apart enemy ships: what should be done about them?

It was clear that the Slavers were strong enough to hurt them - though they had apparently paid a very steep price to do so, they had destroyed an Essence-8 Patropolis, which was in formation with two more (one of whom was Essence 10) and the Titan-Class Citadel Harmonious Gale. Ominously, however, no sign was found of any alien pilots or personages; the wreckage they recovered had no room within for the habitation of crew, and if they did serve as physical means for dematerialized creatures to interact with the material, there was no discernible evidence thereof.

It was on 14 Departing Lightning when the aliens returned; this time it was a single ship, of a small size; it called out to them in the dominant spoken language, transmitted with the same machine song which they called to one another with, approaching to speak. Though the leadership of the fleet was angry, it was agreed to allow the vessel to approach under a flag of parlay; they agreed that they would hear what it had to say.

The small vessel's message was clear and concise; they were furious at the destruction of their worship conduit-slave, but would, in exchange for not destroying the Evacuees, accept the bondage of the star they carried with them and a perpetual tithe of one-quarter of all their worship.

The impact of the Godspear of All-Searing Noon transmitted the response of the fleet far more loudly than any hailing call could have. None would have chastised Sol Invictus for the attack. None would have protested, for the demand was as outrageous to all as it was to him, and it was only his supreme speed on the draw that beat out all the others who readied their weapons to annihilate the offending drone.

There would be war. Another fleet of Patropoli were dispatched to the verdant planet to offer to evacuate as many of it's people as wished to come along; though they could not breathe the air within Autochthonia, it was within their power to place them in preservation crystals as so many Creation-Born yet still slept, and they would be happy to relocate them on another sphere with a climate more suitable to their needs, but when they arrived they discovered that the population had been stripped; the world was devoid of living, animate creatures, and the spirits were gone. How the Slavers had accomplished this, and to what end they did not know; but what they did know was that when purple rents in the ground large enough to be seen from Autochthonia began to form, it was time to leave. The investigation and evacuation fleet of city-ships turned and burnt for home as the planet fractured, then exploded, it's fragments vanishing in purple flashes as they flew outwards.

The strange ways of the Slavers were bewildering, but clearly demonstrated their might. There was no longer any point in lingering; any further resources they may have wished to harvest had been destroyed when the verdant world was destroyed; the Fleet set out, in the direction they believed to be chasing Gaia. Frustratingly, they found nothing which they could identify as a 'star-core', but Bathistophon's offered theories on the Allmind's method of transporting them had born fruit. The plans for a number of devices, which had been dubbed the Star-Tunnel Drive had been produced; as a submodule for the all-vital Plasma Thruster Array it was known as the Star-Tunnel Drive Core, while as a standalone refit, a version had been made to fit upon the larger vessels; Harmonious Gale, the Daystar and Silver Chair primarily among them, but it was simply not possible to scale one down enough that it could be fit within the already-cramped utilitarian hull of the Five-Metal Shrike. The Shrike would have to remain docked to make such a space-rending transit.

All of which was moot at the moment, as they still had to get the things built and installed. The Fleet set out again, departing from the stellar system; the largest city-ships, those with integrated foundries, began to construct their own modules, while those which did not had construction begin back in their docks on Autochthonia. Some of the magical material scrap from Diligent Engine of Artifice was slated for incorporation into the new Star-Tunnel Drive Cores destined for installation on all of the City-Ships. His sacrifice would carry them through the stars, and plans were made to erect a monument to the first martyred Patropolis of this new universe.

It was on their outbound flight that the first notice was taken of the impending apocalypse. The hue of the sickly green sun was taking on a purple tinge when viewed from certain angles. Sensor arrays were deployed, and the truth of the matter soon became clear; violent purple cracks were forming in the burning heliosphere. The impending destruction of the star caused the Evacuee fleet to hurry, but they were running into an ambush - another brilliant tunnel warping it's way across the infinite emptiness heralded the arrival of another fleet of the beings known as Slavers. The immanent destruction of the star, however, forced a quandary; the vast majority of those small vessels would not survive the destructive death throes of the Sickly Sun, but if the enemy deployed their own small vessels in sufficient numbers, then the ones carrying those mighty Warp Bombs would inevitably get through and overwhelm the defenses. All of the pilots knew it, too.

To say there was no hesitation would have been to lie, but there was surprisingly little. Knowing they were almost certainly flying out to die, the pilots on all the Metropoli and Patropoli, in all of the bays around the equator of Autochthonia, began to climb into their ships and launch as the emergent enemy fleet began to launch their own strange vessels, the larger ones moving in to attack. This time there were far more of them - over two hundred large vessels, ranging from the size of Guiding Light of Hope to as small as the Five-Metal Shrike, swooping in behind a cloud of well over two thousand tiny purple fighters, with more of them swarming out of the launch bays in the large vessels every second.

The people of Autochthonia had not been idle while they made their preparations to withdraw. Battle plans had been formulated, strategies simulated, and tactics prepared. This time, the enemy had foolishly put themselves in range of the Sword of Autochthon and the Daystar; though overkill against ships of that size, they certainly were effective. The battle was joined swiftly, and the battle plan was the first casualty.

To this day, it infuriates the Unconquered Sun that none of the internal security systems aboard the Daystar have any clue how the interlopers boarded, but three things are clear: Abyssal and Gremlin Alchemical Exalted somehow managed to board not the world-body of the Titan but the Daystar, concurrently with the ill-timed release of Practice by Bannery Bu for a rampage; the Alchemicals somehow managed to infect the Daystar's targeting systems of the Apollyon Cannon with Gremlin Syndrome, and the first shot attempted from the cannon was horrifyingly mis-targeted, searing with the force of the Sun Unleashed into the Sword of Autochthon, taking the great weapon offline. With the Fleet's most impressive weapons offline, battle raged inside the Daystar, the interloping Dissonant Alchemicals clearly intent on infecting enough of it's control systems with Gremlin Syndrome to hijack it; the Sun was out of the battle, and the Sword of Autochthonia was down as well, leaving Autochthonia with only the point-defense cannon emplacements that hadn't seen use in half a millennia.

The confusion at the start was immediate; no-one could imagine that Sol had turned traitor, but clearly it seemed to happen; only once the communications from Nysela revealed the presence of intruders aboard the Daystar did they realize what happened; without the Fleet's most impressive firepower, it was to the assorted lesser ships to take the battle to the Slavers: a task to which the furious crews of those vessels did, whilst inside Autochthonia all militias were called up and armies were mobilized, in anticipation of the possible need to counter-board the Daystar or the possibility that Autochthonia would come under internal attack in the battle.

The fierce fighting was intense, as repair crews aboard Autochthonia selflessly shuttled to the damaged site of the Sword: what they found was butchery, as not only had the Apollyon Cannon devastated the weapon, but it's beam had somehow infected all the machinery and even the deities nearby with an extremely virulent form of Gremlin Syndrome, for hundreds of miles, a dozen dozen of decks deep. Battle raged within and without, the simulated scream of fighter engines and Warp weapons being fired echoing in the ears of all, as swords and Piston-Driven Megaton Hammers clashed within.

The battle raged on for an hour before the Sickly Sun started to enter it's death throes, and exploded with blinding light, sending a pulse of energy out towards the battle, and it was at that point that the first friendly causality occurred. Throwing caution - and indeed, sense - to the aetheric winds, the Patropolis Excessively Righteous Blossom, failing to grasp the finer (or indeed, gross) points of tactics, "led" a desperate push directly into the enemy's rear formation, firing his cannons wildly at all targets. He only "led" the push in the sense that he transmitted to all units to follow him on his wild run, and five significant vessels gave chase in the hopes of preventing him from being destroyed; Stern Whip of Industry, Guiding Light of Hope, the Five-Metal Shrike, Anarchonaut Anointed by Brilliant Sunlight and Unhesitatingly Loyal Weapon dove into the fracas, calling for Blossom to turn back, but the Patropolis advanced forward into a withering hail of focused fire.

The result was disastrous; the fighters that attempted to follow and provide cover were shredded, and only the Five-Metal Shrike's plasma-beam arrays provided significant area denial against the enemy fighters. Swarmed and forced to rely on significant active defenses, pressed on all sides by the Warp-beams of the enemy cruisers, Blossom turned back only once his essence reserves were tapped; though his Enlightened crew valiantly attempted to save their headstrong Patropolis by the use of their own Charms or donating their own motes of Essence as possible, the defenses couldn't hold, and Excessively Righteous Blossom was torn to shreds by the warp-beams of the enemy fleet. Though they paid dearly for their first Patropolis kill of the engagement, their second was quickly scored when a flight of bombers overwhelmed Unhesitatingly Loyal Weapon's defenses and turned the Patropolis into a shredded and randomized debris field. Over half of the enemy's small ships had been destroyed, and they had lost eighty of their larger vessels, but the Autochthonians felt the loss off two Champions much more severely; Stern Whip of Industry was disabled in the fracas, but Guiding Light managed to break off, tether him and push him back, extending her own shields around the drifting Patropolis, and not a moment too soon.

The shockwave hit, sweeping through the battle; all the small units not safely in the shadow of Autochthonia or piloted by a Celestial Exalt capable of resisting the blast were annihilated, and the blast rocked everything in the fight; however, the attacking purple beings turned, seemingly having decided they'd inflicted sufficient damage, or perhaps having expected the explosion of the Sickly Sun to do more damage. They attempted to withdraw, but this time they were in closer, and their fast-travel tunnel seemed to take longer to generate with more ships attempting to depart; this time the collective damage unleashed was significant; Harmonious Gale unleashed it's titanic beam through their formation, the Patropoli and Metropoli reaped a harvest of vengeance, and the Godspear of the Five-Metal Shrike tore into the single largest ship in the attacking fleet, though it somehow survived and escaped.

Aftermath and the first Star-Tunnel Drive Test

The aftermath of the battle was grim; wreckage had to be painstakingly collected by only the larger, shielded ships, as the intense radiation being emitted from the collapsed remains of the Sickly Sun would have cooked the smaller vessels' crews alive. Excessively Righteous Blossom's last charge had been foolish, and had cost the lives of all of his crew, and all of those who had valiantly served withinUnhesitatingly Loyal Weapon. There wasn't much left to collect of the dead sun, but what there was was in the form of gas and stray particles of dust; samples were adequately collected, as was the wreckage of the battle. Once again the hulks of the destroyed Patropoli were painstakingly shredded to find the Soulgems within, as the grim fleet picked up the pieces; the battle within the Daystar was finished moments after the enemy departed, and Sol Invictus personally joined the fight aboard Autochthonia, where they routed out the infected subsystems.

In the wake of the clean-up, the outbound fleet installed their new Charms, designed by the brilliance of all of their crafters, the theorum for which had been delivered by Bathistophon himself. The fleet's leadership decided that there must be war waged against the purple-metal Slavers, that they would pay for their crimes in attacking them. Luna objected at first, believing that it would be better to chase Gaia, but it was pointed out that Gaia's trail was long cold, and by investigating their hated foes, they might learn of her passage, as the creatures that had attacked them might have encountered her.

Objection settled, the Fleet took up it's formation; the calculations had been entrusted to a brilliant Eclipse-Caste Captain, who led the first jump from the bridge of Guiding Light of Hope, far out in front. Engine cores spun up with powerful, tooth-rattling whines all throughout the fleet, and energy projected out in front of every ship from deep within it. A blue line expanded into a squared blue portal; no-one quite knew what would happen, but everyone trusted Bathistophon's theory. The portals swallowed them whole; from the most massive to the smallest, and the fleet found itself flying through a howling blue tunnel, very much alike to the one which they had experienced five hundred years ago when the Allmind had ejected them from the edge of the Wyld.

Emerging from the Star-Tunnel after only a handful of hours of transit time, the evacuation fleet found itself amidst a strange place; though they had attempted to leap towards the next star along their path, they found no star but a place of luminescent gasses hanging in strange snake-like patterns floating placidly, their soft glow illuminating fields of floating rock, spread out and broad. Consulting their astrologers, they hurried to see if the navigator had made a mistake; they scanned the infinite all-encompassing horizon, and they realized what might have happened when someone looked behind them, and they saw a speck of light directly aft; from the view behind, the Sickly Sun appeared to be where it always had been.

Then they had understood what had happened. They had outrun sight itself, and reached a place where the sight of the Sickly Sun's destruction had yet to reach; as well, from the Sickly Sun, they could not have known what cataclysm had befallen the star they leapt towards, as it had occurred recently.

It was a strange and confusing phenomena, but not the strangest they then would know. The strangest phenomena was that the clouds of strange gas they were detecting were lighting up sensors which had not seen positive results in five centuries; they read as Wyld pockets. Eager for a chance to restock and resupply, the Solar Exalted were sent out to employ the long-unused Wyld-Shaping Technique to let their talents soar again; and then they had their strangest revelation: as the Solars invoking Wyld-Shaping Technique, the Wyld Pockets vanished as they Shaped objects from nothing; as if it had been consumed. Fully half of the available pockets had vanished before the gleeful Wyld-Crafters halted their activities and began to study the strange phenomena.

They examined the phenomena for a full two months before they received a rude surprise; another fleet the size of the one which had attacked them last time made an unwelcome appearance by star-core tunnel. Though the Evacuees were in disarray when they were attacked, this time they had more experience; and the weapons of the Daystar failed to malfunction. Even though the Sword of Autochthonia's repairs were incomplete, the attacking fleet made the tactical error of emerging from their form of rapid transit inside the firing range of the Apollyon cannon, and they were made to regret their error, with precision strikes from the Daystar's cannons annihilating the ships which disgorged their small craft.

Though significant quantities of the enemy small craft did manage to launch before all the launching vessels were destroyed, the attack was blunted before it began, and turned to complete rout in short order; the attacking fleet was turned within half an hour, and the Autochthonians were quickly victorious, taking their parting shots as the enemy fleet retreated. The encounter made clear several facts which they realized they would need to address:

• They had no means to detect the Slavers at interstellar ranges.
  • The Slavers had such a means of detecting them.
• They had no means of detecting incoming attacks before they were nearly atop them, having less than a half minute of notice
• The Slavers had clearly not expected firepower on the scale and range unleashed by the Daystar: whether they would back off, or escalate, was yet to be seen.

Again, the finest minds came together to ponder the new facts in evidence. Chief amongst the issues at hand was that the enemy's trap had cost them the vast majority of their small fighter complement, and they would need them to counter the enemy's fighters. They needed, then, to find a means of resourcing, for which they would need to find a means to locate resources instead of hoping to luck into them. They would also need to develop some kind of sensor technology capable of detecting their hated foes at range.

It was decided to launch all avenues of inquiry simultaneously. That would require that they temper their desire for immediate vengeance, but patience was a virtue as much as bravery was.

The Prosecution Begins

Within a span of ten years, the Autochthonians were on the offensive: using the newly developed Superluminous Sensor Array charms and various submodules, they were able to detect fields of rich resources; and the places where the Slavers congregated. They developed new ships to face them, and new forms of defenses against the weapons their enemies fielded. Their initial attacks were nothing but blazing successes, and by 2111 P.E. they had smashed two fine fleets that the enemy fielded, emancipated a world of strange slaves that took the form of floating balls of worshipful fuzz (who declined to depart with the Evacuees,) and taken vengeance for the world of the Sickly Sun's people by turning the Sword of Autochthon upon the surface of a world which was overgrown with the Slaver's endemic purple machinery, sending it's fractured fragments flying in all directions, as well as having tracked down and scattered numerous Slaver harvesting operations; the revelation that, in addition to coercing worship at the point of a sword, their enemies harvested the strange pockets of Wyld-charged gas for resources had come as a surprise.

They were not the only ones who could adapt, however. The Slavers rallied; they learned to sense the Autochthonian entry, and several times the remnants of Creation's people made a Star-Tunnel entry into a system where they had detected the Slavers only to find empty space; or worse, a trap in the form of vast minefields. They invented new tactics to use against the Autochthonians, including swarms of kamikaze miniature strike craft that launched far faster than fighters.

Throughout the battles, they never made another attempt to contact the Autochthonians, and the Autochthonians attempted to capture one of the enemy's vessels intact, but they always managed to self-destruct before they could be disabled if caught in a Paramagnetic Attractor Beam. They were no closer to understanding the nature of the foe they did battle with than they ever had been, and so a daring plan was hatched. A Circle consisting of young but exceptionally capable Solars, Lunars and Champions was assembled, and outfitted for rapid action in space; they trained outside the hull, wearing nothing more than Celestial Battle Armor or even nothing at all (in the case of the Champions,) and equipped for stealth. If the enemy would always evade capture rather than be boarded, let him not know he had been boarded.

They were launched from the Patropolis Stern Whip of Industry in the next engagement, disguised as part of a general barrage. Lost in the general melee, they flew with only minor course corrections until they slammed into the hull of the largest enemy vessel, a massive behemoth with eight launch tubes operating at full capacity. They slipped in through the glowing purple portals that were disgorging ships, but the launcher self-destructed moments afterwords. That should not have killed a team of six Celestial Exalts, especially ones who had trained for and specifically outfitted with Charms and defenses against Warp, but their transponders were not active, their Soulgems not to be seen on sensors. The entire fleet turned around suddenly, and made to escape.

The six boarders returned shortly before the enemy fleet leapt out of the engagement zone, flying through the launch tubes of a different vessel. The story they had to tell was astounding, if brief: they found themselves on a world, under a purple sky of bright lights hidden behind clouds, where vast racks of the various fighter craft were being unloaded directly through the portals; the amazing thing was that they seemed to be being assembled and launched directly into combat. The factory was vast, the colors purple, brass, and gold dominated; they knew that they had but moments when the portals behind them exploded, and the racks all paused in their movement. They had startled some kind of creature, the first sign that there was any sort of personage behind their enemy; a tall, spindly creature, of purple metal and brass underpinnings, it seemed to be an automaton, but expressed surprise before getting off a shot with a bracer-mounted Warp gun.

Naturally they had captured it, but it somehow escaped by means of Warping out of the grapple, and they had no time to recapture it again, as they knew the enemy would be jumping out. They returned through another ship's still-active launch portal.

At last, they knew something about their enemy.