Welcome to Gaia! :: ~Solar Winds~ (8 users) | Gaia Guilds

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In the beginning it was like a refreshing wind had swept through the galaxy, a romantic dream that excited the weary and gave hope to those that had long since resigned to the pitiless existence of our world. No... Saying it like that is wrong. Perhaps... Some of us just wanted to dream again. In our stark, harsh, reality the young were the only ones that dared to naively grasp at the faint slivers of light left; looking back now I wonder which of us were really the fools Those who reached out so hopefully towards the future, or we who clung stubbornly to the stories of our past.

Planet after planet, the disease spread. No species or habitat seemed able to resist, and try as they might... Even those that quarantined themselves couldn’t hide from the sickly breath that had invaded the universe. Was it the winds that carried it or did it pass from living hosts as it destroyed world after world...? No one seemed to know, even our best and brightest couldn’t figure out how or why this plague had come to be. Planets were lost, civilizations blinking out over night as chaos filled those that watched the destruction. The Alliance... Was the ruling Order that had ensured peace and even prosperity among the many races, in the history of our culture it was the crown jewel of our technology and coexistence. Yet in the end we, too, crumbled as the decay hollowed out our good intentions and revealed just how lost our way of life really was. Order.. Peace.. Everything I.. We.. wanted shattered like glass under the frantic cry for survival. Our last hope was a rallying quest for The Seed. A planet labeled as Myth, the tale so ancient it was but a whisper on our dying breath.. Earth, the Wellspring, the Birthplace. If there was a cure the First Race would know of it, those strange beings called.. Human.. Who were said to once have seeded our many planets and played ancestor to all the races who existed under the Alliance’s gentle embrace. As if rejuvenated by the quest our people threw everything into finding it, the young and old alike setting out into the oldest places of our universe to locate that source of hope; The loyalist of us trading our mortality for cybernetic and biological upgrades so that we might survive the long journey and the vicious plague that nipped at our heels. We believed that we could find it, that when we returned we could return to our natural bodies and continue our short lives alongside those we loved. But we underestimated what the changes had done to us.. Time didn’t register the same way, days seemed like minutes and after a while some simply lost the urgency we had started out with. By the time any of us returned, it was to an unfamiliar and desolate place.. The surviving creatures fought amongst themselves in the ruin and ash, the promise of mortality that had been made to us lost with the bones of our long-dead leaders and comrades. The only part left of our beautiful world.. And we were twisted, tarnishing the memory just as badly as the plague itself.

That dream is little more than a faint echo now, generations passed and untold numbers were lost during our pursuit of this ‘Seed’. The disease faded, still appearing in small spurts every other decade yet it seems those that survived have built up a tolerance if not a true immunity to the sickness. The world that we know now.. Is one of constant change, Warlords fighting for territory in the fringes of society as a number of larger Empires carved out their own places to rule deeper in the galaxy’s core. What was once common technology became rare and, later, considered ancient. Even as ‘advanced’ as these survivor Colonies and Empires consider themselves all of them seek out items from the Ancient Alliance age, either to get a foot up on their enemies in battle or to improve their own society with the lost knowledge.. The stories of ‘The Seed’ and ‘Humans’ are pursued only by the rare few, most have forgotten them entirely aside from a few religious sects. Instead these explorers search for the ruins of those civilizations that perished in the ancient Plague, gathering old relics and lost technologies for either coin.. Or the sad hope of regaining the past they have only heard about from their elders. Yes, our beautiful Alliance is long gone as is the peace and knowledge that marked its era... But the plague is still here, the undying villain of an ancient crime, and for better or worse so are we. What will you do in this shattered world, I wonder.. Will you rebuild it, or let it fade? Rattle the stars for knowledge long lost, or tear your mark into the world like the many warlords roaming about? Leaving this data-long, I can only guess who will find and read it.. But I have hope that, whoever you may be, you remember a small piece of this world I loved so dearly even as you carve out a future for all of us to follow.
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