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Going back to Eyes of the Sun

Excerpt from a modern era history textbook
By today's standards the Caerion, the original Caerion that is, would not have been a particularly great threat; their technology has barely been improved upon but they themselves were an implicitly peaceful race, having long ago fought what wars they needed to teach them the value of Peace. They had little done little research to form their mastery of wormholes and synonymous space fields (SSFs) in to the powerful weapons they are now. Had the Apostles of the New Earth not come upon them they would likely have fallen into peaceful extinction and left their devices to consume themselves, as they had long been planning to do.

Unfortunately they did. When the ANE arrived in the Caerion homestars they had only the technology to say that one of the planets seemed habitable, they were entirely surprised to find a civilization spanning both planetary systems of the binary star, they were running low on fuel and supplies from the long voyage and the Caerion took them in. At the time the Caerion population had shrunk to just under 500 million and they were only actively populating two of the five terraformed planets in the system, within a decade the 700 million that followed the Apostles became naturalized into the Caerion population. In the beginning they joined with sincere desires. Within a few decades the population of original Caerions dwindled to just over 200 million, while the population of naturalized Caerion reduced only by 500 thousand. It was only 117 years after they arrived that the last original Caerion passed on and was put to rest on the burial planet, then finally the planet's systems were activated and the universe consumed it, tearing it down below the atomic level and scattering them across the universe via micro-wormholes. At the time the new Caerions still had every intention of joining them.

Fifty years later however, a new generation was in charge and they looked upon their ancestors history with disdain, limited by the logs and records they interpreted events differently and came to believe that they had been chased out of human civilization, that the UST would have seen them dead just as soon. This generation would not go softly. The original Caerion had passed on nearly all of their knowledge, and though they did not see the weapons buried in their devices, the new generation did. It took only twenty five years to get the population over 10 billion, repopulating the system and bringing it to full production, another 15 and they went to war.

You can't really call it a 'first attack', their first act was not to declare war or take a single system. When the war started it started in 87 systems at exactly the same time. At the time they didn't know that the UST had made first contact with the Uubeq and the Sikantiil so they weren't targeted, but it didn't take them long to notice ships in battle that were very clearly not like anything they knew, in the end it was eight months before they attacked an Uubeq outpost, 14 before they attacked a Sikantiil planet. All three fought back fiercely, but they had never come up against force weaponry, and the wormholes and SSFs they used to arrive just as easily allowed them to leave, ships caught chasing them through would be crushed or annihilated when it shut down as soon as the Caerion vessels are through.

The Uubeq had previously not placed great importance on shielding, their honor system almost forbade it, they took the heaviest casualties. The UST with it's vast population was able to adapt fairly quickly, though they couldn't replicate the FTL systems the Caerion used because they only saw the end point node, they were able to detect incoming attacks and even defend against their weapons to a certain extent within only a few years, mid way through the war they developed similar if less effective weapons systems, but most importantly of all four groups in the war, they were the first to develop force shielding; Just as the original Caerion had no need to attack, they had no need to defend, and basic plasma shielding was more than adequate for anything the universe had thrown at them. Still the war did not turn.

Caerion attacks had slowed, but they were still as overpowering as the first. They did less damage now but they still won out most of the battles, and thirty years in the allied forces had been able to achieve against them was to figure out where they were coming from. Really it was a stroke of luck, in one battle a fighter became disabled and lodged against a Caerion warship, the pilot was badly wounded and the ship was all but entirely disabled so they left it alone, they happened to be loosing this particular fight, and at the time were in retreat. The pilot managed to maintain consciousness for just long enough to transmit a picture of the stars from where they arrived, and just enough made it back through the wormhole before it closed to calculate it's position. Had the pilot died sooner, or had his ship been pointing just far enough in another direction, the image may have been worthless.

It was another twenty years before operation San Francisco was devised. The operation is currently the second largest mobilization of forces on a single target in the known history of the universe. After news of the operation was released to the public Vice Chancellor Asdrose was quoted to have said "This is by far the worst thing any human being has ever done for his fellow man.", General Sehamphr, who lead one of the armadas and had a part in planning the operation said "Today I shall be awarded the greatest medal someone of my position can possibly earn. Tomorrow I shall be executed. I'm not entirely convinced I have earned the medal."

It was shortly after that the tensions leading to the NTC's secession came to the surface. Several of it's benefactors stated that while they could not disagree with what had to be done, they were not comfortable with a government that was willing to do it.

Far gone.
Still working on the basics of this. It'll be really complicated from a story standpoint, plays out as a flashback, or series of flashbacks spaning a period of almost seventy years. The story centers around an as of yet unnamed civilization where magic is not just common, but an integral part of every day life for all but the lowliest citizens. Then one day, the magic stops. The timeline spreads from a brief period just before to a time when the survivors are old and are given the duty of passing on the knowledge of what happened, and how things were, to the second generation after.

It'll mostly be tough because not everybody survives, and the story skips between time like some movies cut scenes.