James R Norwood

In the deep and frozen blackness of space they waited. The passage of centuries did not cool their fury. They set their sights on a trio of worlds. One they would enslave, one they would destroy, and one they would teach. A thousand years in the past they were banished from their home and doomed to roam the stars in ancient ships not capable of sustaining them. Traveling between the stars took a generation, and when they finally found a home, it was barely habitable – rocky and dry and barren. They settled, and they grew, and they evolved until finally they had made the planet in their image, and yet a thousand years is not long enough to overcome the fury that the complete destruction of an entire society creates. As they grew and transformed, their hatred and wrath increased. Their anger overflowed until finally, in a fit of immense rage, they blasted into the stars destroying anything that stood in their way.

They would find their way home and on their journey they would instill fear into lesser civilizations. They would no longer be the dispossessed. They would become the conquerors. They set their sights on their former home, but they no longer belonged there. They would rain destruction down upon their hated forebears. Then they would reach out and take as their own a small blue world barely in its infancy. A world of water and light yet ravaged by war and famine. They would repossess another which they had lost.

Nothing could stop them. To the Negotiator and her legion, the time was right to strike. They would cool their fires on those lesser beings and in so doing prove to their ancestors irrevocably that they were the true Masters of the galaxy. Theirs was the true path, and only in despair would the worlds be cleansed.

They were coming, and soon every being on every world in every corner of the galaxy would know their name. Their name would be whispered in prayers and shouted in fear. The dead would tremble, and the living would faint at the name D’lai.