Brief History Of The Imperium

’+A Brief History of the Imperium+’ by Jathat Muzreb

Introduction

A Standard century has passed since the death of that fiend, the Bloody Pretender Macropedia/Femaron Felard, and with him the last vestiges of the once-great Imperium. Since then, humanity has once again dipped into Decline, trade routes disrupted, whole systems cut off by the inability to travel the Soup, or by wars, famine and tyranny. Where once there was order, there is only chaos, and where there was once justice, now the weak once again are preyed upon the powerful.

As I sit here, among the millions of volumes of Macropedia/Klister University’s library, where once were stored tens of millions, it is easy to grow despondent at what is so clearly the retreat of civilization in the face of barbarity. Still, even as a scholar reports the truth of his times, and those times that have gone before, he must, if for no other reason that fragile desire, find some hope even in tragedy. That is the way of humanity.

I must here credit the three great scholars who have provided so much of the source documentation of this commentary. Chang Singh, whose death a few years ago ended the long line of the ancient scholarly family of Singh, Cho Minh Tel Ran, that brave Macropedia/Anthorph scholar who personally witnessed and bravely recorded some of the attrocities of the Macropedia/Hundred Bloody Days, and Isaac Taub, brilliant historian and my kinsman, whose loyalist and royalist sentiments put him at such great danger in the dying days of the Imperium. The accounts and theories of these three do not always agree, and yet it is they who made the greatest effort to preserve some memory of the past in the face of a new decline of interstellar civilization.

The Chronology/First Expanse and the Chronology/First Decline

One cannot hope to understand the rise of the Imperium without first reviewing that which came before it. The causes of the First Decline are obscured by time. Few enough records could be found by the historians who lived when the Imperium arose, and the intervening centuries have seen most of those precious documents lost. All we have are a few copies and a large number of derivative works, some of which appear to be flights of fancy, motivated by the politics or the simple fads of the day.

Still, we know this much, that in the beginning on Old Terra, our species arose and after millions of years, journied beyond the protective blanket of the home world and into the vast reaches of space. Within a few centuries humanity moved past even their planetary system into the cold reaches of interstellar space, colonizing neighborng star systems in an age prior faster-than-light travel.

Within short order these most ancient colonies were overtaken by Soup travel, and by the end of the millenium that had seen humanity’s first steps into space, many planets had been colonized. But this colonization was of a kind not seen during the Imperium. There was no single human government, nor even a small number of them. There were vast assemblages, some national, some super-national, some religious, some private concerns. The only unification came with the rise of the Oligarchs, clans ruled by men and women who shared more in common with ancient tribal chieftains than with modern rulers. They were the true powers of the age, wealthy beyond imagining, with pawns in every government. Their private disputes became the wars of nations, their philosophies and wants becoming laws and regulations.

Still, even wealth could not overcome physical laws. By the end of the so-called Chronology/First Expanse, Soup travel was becoming more difficult. Hop pollution, which either the Ancients did not know about or chose to ignore, suddenly saw routes become more dangerous, and ultimately impossible. Little by little, the vast and complex series of colonial governments, private interests and Oligarchic networks crumbled. Colonies were plunged into isolation, and while some, mainly those with a stable political and industrial base, survived, just as many fell into various degrees of barbarity, from feudal societies and even stone age hunter gatherers.

While some worlds still maintained some degree of communication, some of these eventually becoming the Macropedia/Imperial Core Worlds, for all intense and purposes humanity was divided into thousands of isolated groups. It was during this murky age that the Macropedia/Anthorphs and their kin, Macropedia/Imudring arose, and possibly even the Macropedia/Heljyks.

The Oligarchs survived as well, though fragmented among dozens of worlds. Like the phoenix that rises from its ashes, on the worlds where they fled in the dying days of the First Expanse, they rebuilt their wealth and their power, and, perhaps, waited for the day when they could again spread their influence to the stars.