Arrival

On the rusted, orange surface of Aurelion, the wind carries only the scent of iron. For millennia, the planet has bled into the void, its atmosphere thinning to a hazy shroud of dust.

Scapegoating the Pleiadian tribes for the planet's decay, the Cydonian Empire arose and purged them, exiling the Pleiadians to the margins of space. To ensure their dominance and continued survival in a dying world, the Cydonians forged a technological apparatus they named Apex Null to lead them. Housed within a monolithic, floating, obsidian pyramid, Apex drifts through the toxic clouds like a silent god.

Centuries pass. Though the world remains desolate, the rigid formality of the empire has softened. Apex Null is the architect of all things, while the remaining populace has enlisted into the Inter-Stellar Imperion, or, ISI.

From its iron ranks emerged a figure of dark ambition. The Exarch is a man haunted by ancient memories of a home world lost to time. He was sold as a child to a pair of jester-like humanoids who brought him to the rust of Aurelion. It was on this desolate planet that he clawed his way through the bureaucracy of war until even Apex Null found him indispensable.

Seeking a permanent solution to Aurelion's death, Apex turned its gaze toward the planet of Orizaya. During a briefing on the planet's vast resources, it whispered to the Exarch a secret of the ancient cosmos.

"On Orizaya - hidden within the frozen veins of the Kaltic Mountains is a sapphire-adorned chest. Within it rests the mortal heart of Sister Alcyone, the Sapphire Starseed. It is the anchor of that world's life."

Driven by a hunger for divine sight, the power to peer across the dimensions and find the parents who were stolen from him, the dark figure departed for Orizaya in secret, his ship cutting through the void like a shard of glass.

He landed, trekked into the howling gales of the Kaltic Mountains, descending into a cavern where the ice was as old as the stars; and there, he found it. The heart of a goddess, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic blue light.

As he grasped the relic, the divine sight did not show him a distant world. He saw instead the face of his heritage. As he stood on the soil where he had been born, the truth flared. He was a son of Orizaya.

For a moment, he bathed in Anger. But suddenly, the ground beneath his feet began to quake.

The Exarch's theft broke an ancient silence. The ground now heaved with the fury of a wounded god. From the depths of the mountain, the dragon Lithos shattered his tomb of permafrost, piercing through the icy surface.

As the dark figure's vessel ascended, fleeing toward the stars with the stolen sapphire heart, the shadow of Lithos fell across the world.

A herald of a war that would consume the heavens!