The story of the galaxy

The star that breathed

At the very centre of the galaxy there once burned Omega - a core star, bigger and older than anything modern astronomy knows. It did not shine like ordinary suns. Its light came in waves, in a rhythm so even that the first Aether observers believed it artificial. They wrote in their chronicles that “Omega does not burn - Omega breathes”.

Around it orbited worlds that no one ever visited. We know only what survived in the oldest records: that their surfaces were smooth as glass, that they glowed violet at night and that no ship that tried to reach them ever came back. Omega was like a lighthouse in the middle of an ocean - everyone saw it, nobody knew who had lit it.

The Shattering

No one knows what broke it. All that is certain is that one day the breathing stopped. First the light went out - for hours, for the first time in recorded history. Then the core cracked.

The shockwave crossed the galaxy faster than light. It scattered fragments of the star across the void - Omega Shards, crystals in which the trapped energy of the core still burns today. Six colours, six kinds: fire, void, time, stars, echo and corona. Where Omega had stood, a wound in space remained: a region later named Genesis. Sector G-1.

The worlds around the star did not vanish. They died. Their glass surfaces cracked, their oceans boiled away, and their dead crust revealed something that had been hidden underneath all along.

The Seals

Signs are carved into the dead planets of Genesis. Circles thousands of kilometres wide, straight lines running across whole continents, geometry so precise it could not have formed on its own. In the deepest grooves a violet light still smoulders today. Pilots call them the ancient seals.

The Aether claim the seals are older than they are - and the Aether are the oldest race we know. Who placed them? Why? A theory circulates in the Aether archives that no one has confirmed out loud: that the seals were not meant to protect Omega from the world. They were meant to protect the world from what was inside Omega.

“The seals are older than us. Someone sealed Omega long before we learned to look at the stars. The question is not who sealed it - but what it was protecting us from.”from the Aether archive, declassified fragment

Three roads

For centuries Genesis was silent, and three civilisations lived without knowing about one another.

The Aether watched. Scattered, without a homeworld, they kept up one unbroken study - recording every change in the light of Genesis, every tremor of the seals. Three thousand years of notes they never showed to anyone.

The Terrans fled. When Earth began to die, the last ships of the Exodus Fleet took what was left of humanity and set off into the void with no destination - anywhere, as long as it was further away. For a hundred and twenty years they built stations, shipyards and trade routes, learning to live where no one should. They no longer had a home. They had each other and a principle that became their motto: unity, progress, strength.

The Vorn survived. Their world, Karrath, is a planet of storms, acid seas and nights that last for years. Where metal rusted in a week, the Vorn learned to grow what they could not build. Their first ships did not roll off a slipway - they hatched. Living hulls that heal their wounds and learn from every battle.

The Signal

And then came the Signal - one pulse from the heart of the galaxy that passed through every inhabited world at once. Communication networks went dark, instruments went mad, and in the void between the stars portals dormant for ages lit up: a chain of gates leading from the outskirts straight to the centre. The Front's calendar counts its years from that very day. Year zero.

Three civilisations understood the same thing at the same moment: the road to the heart of the galaxy stood open. The Terrans saw in it a new home and new markets. The Aether - the answer to a question they had been asking for millennia. The Vorn - a challenge to be met before someone else did.

All three fleets set off through the portals in the same week. None of them knew it was not alone. That is how the Omega Front was born: a belt of twenty-three sectors where three races were about to meet for the first time.

The JTV Incident

The first meeting took place on the JTV junction, between Terran and Vorn space. A Terran patrol saw something on its radars that did not answer hails, moved like a living creature and had a hull made of tissue. In that same sector, pilots had been dying for weeks in attacks by unknown predators. The patrol commander made the decision in three seconds.

The Vorn ship survived - living hulls heal faster than steel. But the Vorn remembered who fired first. For the next year the JTA, JTV and JAV junctions were a place where every unknown signal meant a fight. The Aether watched from a distance without interfering. When they finally sent a message, it read: “You are shooting at each other while the real enemy grows”.

They were right.

The Night of the Reapers

The Signal woke more than the portals. In the dust left by Omega's shattering something had always lived that nobody took seriously - tiny, translucent organisms drifting between asteroids, which the first pilots called plankton. After the Signal they began to grow. And to hunt.

The Swarm is not an army or a race you can negotiate with. It is an ecosystem that feeds on Omega's energy: the closer to the heart of the galaxy, the more of it there is in space - and the bigger the creatures that feed on it. On the outskirts they are small scouts. On the junctions - Reapers that tear convoys apart. Packs of Hunters prowl the borderlands, Devourers wait in the N-1 centre, and Genesis itself is home to beings pilots have named after legends: the Behemoth, which births its own swarm, the Overlord, the Harbinger and Oblivion.

In the third year of the Front the Swarm struck every junction on the same night. Reapers came out of the void by the hundreds, in perfect sync, as if something was guiding them. Convoys of all three races were lost. The pilots who survived all told the same story: the Swarm did not attack blindly. It split fleets, cut off escape routes and learned.

The worst came later. Beasts that had defeated a pilot came back stronger - with scars from their fights and behaviour they never had before. Those who met such a beast and survived gave it a name: Nemesis.

The N-1 Pact

After the Night of the Reapers no one believed they could win alone. The Terrans called the meeting - because war is bad business, and the Swarm doesn't pay for goods. They chose the only place every race was equally far from: sector N-1, the hub at the very centre of the portal network, with roads to all three borderlands and to Genesis.

Admiral Mira Castell of the Exodus Fleet arrived in a single unarmed ship. The Vorn sent Kharra - the huntress who was the first to kill a Devourer and wore its fang as a sign. The Aether sent no one. For three days the table for their delegation stood empty. On the fourth day Warden Ysael appeared on the station, laid a crystal with three thousand years of observation data on the table and spoke a single sentence: “Balance is the condition of the future”.

The Pact has three points. Sector N-1 is neutral space. Every race may fly through the portals of all the others. And the third, most important one: a pilot's place on the Front is decided by their ship, their skill and their choices - never by their origin. It is still that way today.

The road to Genesis

The Aether data showed something no one wanted to see: since the day of the Signal, the violet light in the seals has been fading. Slowly, but without pause. Whatever was locked away in Genesis, the lock is failing.

The combined fleets of the Pact broke through the N-1 centre and opened the portal to G-1. On the dead planets of Genesis, among the seals and the mightiest beasts of the Swarm, someone found an Omega Shard for the first time - a fragment of the core star in which its energy still burns. The news spread across the whole Front within hours. And with it a legend: whoever gathers all six shards will put together the Heart of Omega. Nobody knows what will happen then. Everyone wants to be the one who finds out.

“The Harbinger was in Genesis one day before the Signal. Our probes saw it. It did not follow us - it was waiting for us.”Warden Ysael's report to the Pact Council

Era I · Genesis

This is where your story begins. You are a pilot of the Front. You start at your race's base with a small Sparrow and an empty cargo hold. Ahead of you lie twenty-three sectors, a Swarm that learns, other pilots who want the same things you do - and seals that someone once placed there for a reason.

Every predator shot down, every new ship, every trophy is a line in the chronicle of this Era. The best will go down in the server's history. The rest will become dust in Genesis.

The heart of the galaxy is calling. Will you answer?