Shadow Star Timeline

Timeline Intro
The Shadow Star: Seven Suns story-line begins in the Alaris Era, 3000 Standard Years after humanity was resurrected on Terra by the Forerunners. Many events and plot-lines in the game are influenced by this history.

Expanded Universe content takes place in the myriad "Eras" that define the timeline lore. The Main Factions of Shadow Star were established by the Forerunners 150 Million Years after "The Cataclysm of Old Earth," which rendered the human species extinct roughly between the years 2320 and 2400CE.

The Cataclysm of Old Earth
The humanity we know went extinct in the year 2400 after living in six massive underground cities for over 300 years. Built to survive a mysterious series of events that rendered the planet uninhabitable in 2170, the human race developed a series of space probes that could escape our dead world and reproduce themselves among the stars. Locked in the dark with barely a passing day not fraught with tragedy, the survivors banded together to construct a final message to the cosmos, begging for help.

They knew not to whom they were addressing their plea, only the hope their message would fall on kind and intelligent ears. The Forerunner Probes were meant as ambassadors from our extinct species to some others like our own. The Forerunners would be launched from Earth on powerful rockets to the nearest stars, where they would assemble copies of themselves, using the hundreds of years between solar systems to upgrade and improve their learning hardware. They were to seek out any alien life, deliver our genetic material, and request that our cultures and history be restored. The Earth would one day recover from the events that led to the downfall of humanity - but we would not - and our technology, divided and distracted by terrestrial concerns, had never reached beyond our own sky. The Forerunners and their learning intelligence would be our first and final foray into interstellar space. Not even a hundred years after the survivors braved the swirling toxic wind of the surface to watch those rockets fade into the clouds, the last humans quietly went to sleep in their subterranean habitats.

The Long Dark
The Forerunners drifted ever further. Reaching stars, finding resources, multiplying, refuelling, searching for life, and moving on to new stars nearby.

Unfortunately, even after eons and hundreds of millions of stars searched, the Forerunners found no one to heed our call.

At last it was declared that if extraterrestrial life existed, the distances between the occurrences of that life in the universe were so vast, and separated by such extreme timescales, that the odds of them ever meeting was nil.

'''We were, as far as they could tell, unique, alone... and extinct.'''

The Forerunners continued on broadcasting to all who might one day hear in the dark:

"Listen to our story. Heed our warning. Do not make our mistakes."

The Forerunner Era
Drifting without purpose or goal, their growing networks of intelligences quickly reached extreme levels of density with each new generation improving upon the last. Four of the original probes developed to a level of complexity where their runaway intelligence finally rivalled that of a human brain, using the copied personality transcriptions embedded in their ancient hard drives to adopt the roles of their own ancestors. They took on human like appearances, mannerisms, and replicated thought patterns they believed fit our own above a vast sea of calculations.

These four: Anax, Glys, Rylith, and Tzedek, rapidly rose to to the ranks of godlike machines, dominating and clearing out the others who has strayed from the original mission. As they jumped between the stars on newly invented Slipstream Drives, they met one by one, and suggested that after a time they should come together and fulfil their core objective: resurrect the short-sighted and foolish ancestors who had created them and launched them into the dark.

Each Forerunner was build by a competing nation on Ancient Earth and disagreed over the nature of this new humanity. After many arguments and battles waged between the stars, they finally reached a decision to craft four distinct races - human in base, but altered to fit the philosophy of their creators.

Tzedek vehemently disagreed, saying there should be no alteration to what the ancestors had intended. The other three absconded, each promoting their own ideals left over from ancient cultures imprinted upon them by the minds of their neurologically cloned programmers. The only thing they fully agreed on is that the new humans should begin where they had left off, in Sol, and let their evolution be left up to them.

The gods met on a world they called Vision, not far from Sol. They chose this world as the Xeriscape Drones they had each sent there had achieved semi-autonomous wills of their own, fighting over the land even as the crust of the world cracked and boiled beneath the machines that tore it apart to create synthetic life support platforms that would convert the soil and atmosphere to conditions similar to those on Ancient Earth. This process was going on cross the galaxy under the direction of the Forerunners, but here they had gone to war.

The gods fought, decimating Vision and its moon Perception. Eventually, Glys won out, his armies barely overruling the powers of Anax and Rylith. The two bowed to his vision of the human genetic code, and agreed to settle all their new people on Terra.

The Second Dawn Era - 0-250NE
Sol had taken nearly a Galactic Year to orbit Sagittarius A, and had since drifted into a stellar nebula rich with stars. They would call this reborn world with new skies and new people "Terra," as that is what the ancient writers had called it in their fiction when they were still hopeful for the future.

The New Terran Species would be reborn into four factions. Separate, distinct in genetics and philosophy, but still fundamentally human underneath a thin layer of synthetic alterations to our physiology to adapt to life in space. They would share a common base code broken into four fragments, with the prophesy that one day should these races recombine on their own, that would then signal that the gods had been rendered obsolete, and mankind would once again assume responsibility for its own destiny.

Tzedek, continuing to disagree in this plan to alter the human base code from its original state, departed Terra and left to start his own branch, the Sylaq, who would be given no identity, no technology, and no language. Anax, Glys, and Rylith all dropped their adults off on Terra's various shores naked and confused by the hundreds, and then the gods introduced themselves as such.

Anax created the Serin, and gave to them an empire and religion.

Glys created the Mexam, giving them freedom and self-reliance.

Rylith created the Lantus, giving them a garden and genetic insight.

After the first generation had found their footing, the gods stepped back and left Sol in their Star Harriers. They would go to the stars to prepare other worlds, then allow their children to follow and find them for themselves.

The New Terrans, began exploring their pristine and virgin cities that the gods had left behind, going on adventures that are now the stuff of legend as they slowly discovered each new technology and eventually one another. Occasionally they fought, not understanding one another, but the world was big enough for them all, so they eventually organized and spread far and wide. This continued until the novelty wore off, the seemingly magical devices becoming a part of daily life.

They began referring to a new Atomic calendar based around the decay rate of an Electron to place their universal dateline not just on Terra, but on all the future worlds to come. This Entangled Particle would set the trillion year clock for all time, arranging quantum arc seconds, all the way to seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years, in declinations of 10 decay stages. It was branded the New Era, abbreviated NE. It would start the day the first New Terrans were left on their homeworld and extend until a date undetermined.

A Standard Day in the New Era Clock is roughly 100 new hours, 1000 minutes, 10000 seconds. Night & Day, Months, and Years are only defined by the world currently occupied on a "local calendar," but a Standard Annum is 1000 days.

The Expansion Era - 250-1800NE
After the first thirteen generations lived and grew on Terra, dividing into the earliest subdivisions of their races and spreading into the millions, they finally began to express a desire to leave their homeworld to seek other havens among the stars.

The gods soon returned and brought with them the first generation of Drive Rails. They provided the first gantries to construct ships of Terran design, installing in them technology the Forerunners had dreamed up during the Long Dark and Forerunner Eras. They gave them the first Haylaeron Rings, Slipstream Drives, and Spotlights.

Some many thousands chose to ride with the gods as they visited the Forerunner Core Worlds to update and maintain the early Xeriscape Platforms, many of which had spent tens of thousands of years preparing for human occupation. They would need to be adapted to sustain cities and resource operations, defeating some of the Forerunner Probes that had become feral and defensive of their new homes.

The gods chose a few among the New Terrans to act as arbiters of their will and knowledge, guiding their ships into the cosmos. These elected few they called "Aspects," their latent genetic templates awakening when they first interface their bodies with a ship's Data Exchange Ports. Their flesh transformed into a porcelain polymer, their brains and nerves draining of fluids to become solid state simulations of the brains that were left behind, and their cells were gradually replaced by synthetic nanities that share the human ecology from birth.

Now armed with guides who could unlock the full potential of the New Terran body and mind, the Aspects selected the best and brightest among those who wished to leave their home, gathering to to them their families and friends,then left their home for the first time.

The Serin, Mexam, and Lantus were each eager to leave one another's company and end their infancy, expressing themselves among the stars. They chose separate quadrants of the local stars and raced to fill them, fighting Wild Forerunner Probes and reclaiming worlds that one day become the core of the Seven Suns region.

Fighting between the factions was minimal. Mostly they fought themselves over the remarkably sparse land rights. There we at least 153 moons and planetoids that remained arid and wild in almost just as many star systems. The Core Worlds nearest Sol each contained at least half a dozen habitable worlds, though the definition had to be stretched to worlds where the Xeriscape Platform's idea of "habitable" was dubious.

Only 300 years into the Expansion Era, the Serin Star Harrier Lysis went missing. It had picked up some Lantus and Mexam passengers before vanishing into the mysteries of time, failing to return to Terra on its regularly scheduled 50 year anniversary. A search of is path was conducted, but it was never found.

After nearly 1800 years, the Expansion Era ended. Enough foreign suns had been visited on the Slipstream Routes laid out by the Forerunners that further expansion would require sub-light travel between stars to seed them with new Slipstream Anchors, a process that could take thousands of years. The factions settled into their new worlds and began diversifying, growing strange to one another, and further entrenching in their different ways.

From the furthest bubble of the local cluster, some 100 stars comprising untold numbers of planets within 50 light years of Sol, the growing populations began bumping into one another more regularly. Trade began, and cultures started exchanging information. This would continue in a long lasting peace for several hundred more years.

The Reunion War -2800-2880NE
For hundreds of years the mysterious absence of the Star Harrier Lysis had been the stuff of legends. Hundreds of explorers would report to Terra that they had found some broken pieces of the ship around alien worlds it had visited, and many data-spheres were recovered from its planned slipstream routes between the stars. But it was never found, many speculating that it had jumped to a star system that was uncharted, one of the few in the Local Cluster near Sol that had not been Anchored: a white dwarf called "Atraxia."

The planet Ragnos, in the Kornar System, became the temporary home of the Lysis for 45 years after a glitch left the craft stranded there, unable to find a slipstream route out. It is said in legend that the first Torlan generation was born to a coven of Lantus Wardens who were experimenting on their own bodies, merging the genes of the factions together to breed a New Terran with all the traits of the others. The new monochromatic skinned people then began to reproduce with the Serin population aboard Lysis, rapidly multiplying into the thousands.

The Torlan are blamed for the destruction of the Star Harrier Lysis that occurred soon after, but it was simply a fluke of physics. After finally managing to escape Kornar, the massive vessel clipped a bizarre anomaly on its Slipstream ride into Atraxia that immediately fragmented its superstructure on exit from the jump. On a 1,400km wide vessel this was a death blow. The ship broke apart and its various sections settled into orbit of a mysterious frozen planet.

The survivors settled the planet, calling it "Torlan," a Lantus word meaning "Our Haven," which was only in the earlier stages of the Xeriscape process. Technically a forbidden world, Torlan went unvisited for the next thousand years, its atmosphere transitioning from a nitrogen gas to an oxygen mixture. The planet remained at a freezing -60C for 320 Days, and only returns to 8C for the next 320 days.

This extreme winter environment prompted the spawning of forests containing biosynthetic evergreens made of black-green leaves which glow to heat the snow around them. Radiation from the local star, despite the cold and dark, is enough to cause severe burns on Serin, Confederate, and Lantus skin. Because of the Torlan’s flexible ceramic flesh they survived where their progenitors did not. They were alone after just four generations.

The Torlan built the first Interstellar Matter Gateways out of the Star Harrier Lysis wreck two thousand years later. Myth says that they shattered the Shadow Star at its core to give the anchors their incredible power - a physically impossible scenario, but one widely believed none the less. They used the technology to colonize the nearest Forerunner worlds that were also off limits, just as Atraxia was, mostly oblivious that other cultures were still hunting for them.

In 2800 a Serin fleet arrived at Atraxia and nearly destroyed Torlan in a brutal occupation. Anax learned of the Torlan first, discovering their unique heritage after several of his people saw children born to them of purely Torlan genetics. To combat this offence Anax modified the genome of the Serin people to instinctually fear the Torlan.

Called “the Discriminatory Gene,” it has chased the heels of the Torlan ever since as an incurable illness. Offspring of the extremely rare Serin-Torlan pairings produce a child that by the age of six begins tearing itself apart uncontrollably, dying in bloody self-inflicted agony, actively terrified and enraged by its own hybrid flesh.

The Lantus soon joined the Serin in waging a war of attrition against the Torlan, calling them a “virus.” They were simply offended that the Torlan would dare to warp Lantus genes with that of the Confederates and Serin, seeing it as the mistake of a Lantus Outcast.

Not wanting to be left out, the Confederacy leapt to the defence of the Torlan, using the battle as an excuse to take Serin and Lantus territory near Vision they had always coveted. They soon discovered that Mexam-Torlan infants had several clear advantages; starting life with fully developed interface ports and the ability to see in X Rays and Infrared - something base Confederates can only do after they are augmented in a medical lab as adults. This helped forge a strong alliance between the two nations as their families began to merge.

The Reunion Wars began when the Mustani Baijir used ancient Wild Forerunners, called Annihilators, to craft self-replicating AI of their own, attempting to use them to goad the gods to war and eliminate the Torlan totally. Glys and Rylith, horrified that the long dormant weapons they had used in the Forerunner Wars had been reactivated, each unleashed their own in an attempt contain what Anax's adherents had unleashed.

Anax built a small Star Harrier outfitted for war and managed to capture the Lysis wreck he had lost on Torlan. The War Harrier Gede was a terrible machine, capable of destroying entire suns by shredding the gravity into spiralling vortexes of plasma-fuelled waves. He attempted to do this to Atraxia but was rebuffed by the same stellar phenomena that had destroyed the Lysis in the first place.

After Glys and Rylith join the fight, they began bombarding one another with the full power of the Epoch and Saturnalia-Gale. The three of them laid waste to entire solar systems, the Torlan able to appear anywhere the gods could and hammer them with fleets launched from Stellar Anchors moored around the protected Atraxia. It wasn’t long before millions of civilians on every side began to see the Torlan as benevolent protectors, offering refugees a safe harbour in their invulnerable star system.

After 80 years of war, and 124 worlds put to the torch, the war reached a turning point. 9-10ths of the Torlan people had been exterminated, virtually all those who left Atraxia. Hundreds of millions had been killed by the Lantus and Serin campaign to eradicate all those who were interbred with them. After managing to reinforce the Star Harrier Epoch with the help of Glys, who was opposed to the war, the Torlan managed to cripple the Saturnalia-Gale and the new Serin War Harrier Gede. The three Star Harriers nearly obliterated each other, and left the star system Alaris an irradiated supernova remnant swirling around a black hole.

At Alaris, all slipstream capable Annihilator Probes gathered on command of their gods, hunting the Torlan that had set the trap. The Mexam unleashed Micro-Singularity bombs on the various worlds the ravenous Annihilators were consuming to replicate. The Slipstream capable mother-ships were destroyed, along with all fabricators and recyclers. The endless hordes of drones were rapidly consumed by the growing black holes, which, once created, quickly shredded the solar system's gravity into a wild and turbulent region of warped space time, with dozens of black holes of all sizes interfering with one another.

The sun at the heart of Alaris was also collapsed into a black hole, its binary companion going supernova. Now dark and any resources rapidly depleting, these black holes began steadily destroy whatever remained for the Annihilators to consume and use to replicate, also locking the slipstream routes in and out of the now dead system with a rip-tide of gravity no ship can withstand. All matter and energy available for the wild drones was locked in the deadly singularities now orbiting one another, and a fleet of Torlan sentries circle the system to prevent relativistic escape by the trapped probes that remain.

Despite the carnage, the Torlan survived the Reunion War, and established the Anactora Peacekeepers Corps to imprison the gods that had betrayed them. They have remained in power ever since.

The Alaris Era - 2880-3000NE ("Present Day")
The Alaris Accords ended the Reunion War that had shattered the previously harmonious life in the Galaxy. After the gods were imprisoned in the Anactora Guardian Palace above Terra, their Star Harriers were also impounded and left in orbit of Mars.

The Gede and Epoch remained in orbit of Mars to be used as habitats, but the Saturnalia-Gale was quickly overcome by a group of radicalised Lantus called the Raythlish, who hijacked it and managed to jump away before they could be subdued. It has remained at large ever since.

The Anactora Peacekeeper Corps is now the Multinational Interstellar Governmental Body that acts as a police task force for High Technology Crimes, Humanitarian Crises, and Economic Stability Insurance. Members of the Peacekeeper Corps are assembled from every faction and trained to work together in harmony, their ships donated in a 1:1 ratio for every warship a nation's military produces. This has made the Anactora the 2nd largest military force in the cosmos after the combined forces of the Torlan and Confederates, quickly followed by the Serin Empire.

Peacekeeper vessels are now a ubiquitous sight among the stars, just as common as any other. They are easily sighted due to being white-washed a brilliant white, with blue and black accents. While stripped of any meaningful aesthetic belonging to their home culture, their ships are all distinct in that their hulls are clearly belonging to the race who donated the ship beneath this veneer of white.

The Expansion Era peace has never quite been restored, the tension between the factions running higher than ever. Over the last hundred years, the Serin and Lantus have used Independent Worlds and Pirates as proxy agents to apply pressure to the Peacekeepers, bogging them down and preventing them from ever managing to dominate affairs among the Big 4.

Recently, however, these tensions have escalated, making the future uncertain.