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long time ago, oh, a few hundred Galactic Revolutions of Nephestal, the Iaranor thought they had ended war. They had an Empire, very like the Human except that it didn't control the entire Galaxy. Their colonization had not reached so far. Fewer planets were fit to support life, in those days. The stories tell that there was a long period of peace, a Pax Iaranori I suppose you would call it. The Iaranori built many beautiful buildings, and made lovely decoration, and stumbled across some profound and stunning music. And their biologists made efforts to breed aggressiveness out of their race. Well, this Empire of the Iaranor lasted for a good long time, but it didn't get much larger, nor did the Iaranor respond when hostile Core cultures made forays into the Scattered Worlds. Soon their Empire began to crumble around the edges, simply from entropy. Finally the Emperor -- an Iaranori named Takonnen -- took action. He undid what the biologists had done, reintroduced the genes for aggressive tendencies, bred an entire planet of atavistic Iaranori. Under their chieftain, Batydded, these new Iaranori supernovaed forth and, in a generation of gloody war, doubled the size of the Empire until it embraced every Iaranor in the Galaxy. Batydded herself led expeditions against the Core worlds, toppled their structures of government, and removed Core military influence for millions of years. That generation of Iaranori produced works of visual art, symphonies, drama, and literature that dazzled all subsequent civilizations. Ismallia, Batydded's capital, is still one of the most impressive worlds in the Galaxy. The Empire soon fell apart into warring factions. The Iaranor live longer than Humans, but they do not live slower. Batydded lived to see her Empire torn apart and the Iaranor went through hundreds of generations of ignoble strife before they finally reached true racial maturity. |
| The Tale of Yx and Ellan |
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